Conference Agenda

To ensure a primarily renewable energy supply, solutions must be found to

avoid temporal discrepancies between electricity demand and the availability of

power generated by wind and solar. One possibility to do so is by increased involvement

of consumers in the management of electricity provision. Through the

formation of energy communities that seek to be largely self-sufficient with their

own renewable generation enthusiasm for demand flexibility could be boosted

and fresh incentives could be generated.

To test this hypothesis, we conducted an experiment with 6, 775 participants within

a large household survey in nine European countries. We randomly split the participants

into two equally sized groups. Both groups were asked whether they

wanted to shift their electricity demand for environmental reasons and whether

they would accept a time-of-use tariff that adjusts electricity prices over time to

provide a monetary incentive for demand flexibility. For the first group, the decision

setting was framed as an offer from their current energy supplier; for the

second group, it was framed as an opportunity to participate in a self-sufficient

energy community.

Our results show a certain willingness of consumers to adopt load-shifting behaviors

and e.g. use an app that notifies them about opportune times to save energy

and, by that, CO2 emissions. We cannot find a positive effect of energy community

membership here. When bringing in the financial aspect and trying to elicit people’s

willingness to either switch to a time-of-use pricing tariff provided by their

current provider respectively joining a largely self-sustained energy community,

we can observe that while people are open to switch to a flexible pricing scheme

in the first setting, this share is significantly lower under the energy community

frame.