It’s worth mixing it up: what combination of policies will lead to a clean energy future?

How can we ensure that as many households as possible adopt not only solar panels, but also their own battery to store solar energy, a heat pump, and an electric car? Researchers at the Universities of Basel and Geneva have looked into just this question.

Climate protection and the energy revolution must continue to make progress, and private households could make a significant contribution to this goal if they would use environmentally friendly technologies such as solar panels, electric vehicles, and heat pumps. Dr. Mart van der Kam and Professor Ulf Hahnel at the University of Basel, Switzerland, conducted research into the political measures that would be necessary to fully realize this potential.

Together with researchers from the University of Geneva, their team first surveyed nearly 1,500 Swiss households on why they decided for or against environmentally friendly technologies. They then fed the data into a dynamic model representing the households and their interactions as a society of decision-makers. This allowed the researchers to test which policy measures best met the needs of the households and would therefore support these technologies being more widely adopted. Their findings recently appeared in Cell Reports Sustainability.

Individual incentives have too little effect

Mart van der Kam acknowledges that increasing competition among manufacturers is making it more affordable and more attractive for consumers to adopt environmentally friendly technologies such as electric cars. However, he says that political measures are necessary to encourage more widespread use of technologies such as solar panels and heat pumps. “It’s not individual incentives, but rather the proper mix of political measures that makes a decisive difference,” he emphasizes, summarizing their findings.

Subsidies for solar panels or heat pumps, for example, are just one piece of the puzzle. It is also important to remove the barriers that prevent renters from using these technologies. “Until now, the building owners have had to make the investment, but the renters have profited from the reduced energy costs,” van der Kam points out. This has made the investment less worthwhile for the owners.

Solutions for renters

The example of solar panels demonstrates how such hurdles for renters can be dismantled via government intervention: for several years now, renters have had the right to install solar panels on their balconies. Van der Kam suggests that policies supporting similar solutions for heat pumps or energy storage might be possible in the future, perhaps in the form of neighborhood batteries that could be supplied with solar energy from multiple buildings or an entire district at once and then used as a power source.

“Nearly two-thirds of Swiss households are renters. This represents an enormous untapped potential that could provide a major step forward toward the energy revolution,” says Ulf Hahnel. He argues that interdisciplinary research that not only takes technological innovations into account, but also consumers’ various preferences, can identify paths for targeted stimulus packages and structures. “We must bring different disciplines and their methods together to tackle complex and multifaceted challenges such as climate change and the energy revolution,” Hahnel emphasizes.