An assessment of consumer willingness to pay for Renewable Energy Sources use in Italy: a payment card approach

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 one thousand phone interviews make in January 19-23, 2006. Following Blaine et al (2005) in our framework we obtain the consumer’s WTP by payment cards approach. The use of this procedure allows us to obtain robust statistical results and relevant policy indication too. 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 but preliminary results also confirm that WTP differs from the declaration of intent and that it also varies with age, social status and income.