“How much Italians are willing to pay for Renewable Energy Sources?”. A comparison of two methodological approaches.,

In reference to the “Renewable Sources” EU Directive 2001/77/CE the Italian goal, for 2010, is to attain the share of 22% in RES electricity production. In such context it becomes basic to explore the existence of consumer’s Willingness to Pay (WTP) in order to use green energy in the electricity production. Our aim is twofold. First one we assess the market sustainability of such energy policy goal and therefore we evaluate the degree of necessary public aid related with the same target policy. Prior studies have found a contained consumer’s WTP if compared with the national policy energy goal as in Ivanova (2004) for Queensland and Batley et al. (2001) for UK. Our study is founded on a national survey with two thousand phone interviews make in two distinct periods: January 19-23, 2006 and January 26-30, 2006. On the whole first finding shows that exists a wide consensus for the use of RES (84% of answerer) especially among younger, upper class and educated and preliminary results also confirm that WTP varies with social status and income. In our framework we obtain the consumer’s WTP by two different methodological approach the payment cards (PC) and the contingent valuation (CV); to this the sample is divided in two part. a) In the first sub-sample the preliminary results are much heterogeneous: the 31% of answerer are willing to pay a 30 euro yearly increase in the cost of electricity bill, the 18% would accept to pay 60 € yearly and the 7% have a WTP equal to 120 euro annual while the 39% are not willing to pay more. Our findings (Bollino – Polinori, 2006) support the view that in Italy there is some consensus on the development of RES. In monetary value, this consensus is estimated between 25% and 41% of the total subsidy cost. b) In the second sub-sample the answerer are faced with the choice to pay a yearly increase included between 5 and 20 euro. In this case the 49% of the answerer have a WTP equal zero and only the 51% are willing to pay more the electricity produced by RES. In particular only 8% would accept to pay 20 euro while 43% accept the increase of 5 euro; among these last one the 65% declare a WTP of 20 euro too. The use of this double procedure (a, b) allows us to obtain robust statistical results and relevant policy indication too.