Distributional justice, effectiveness, and costs of current and alternative solar PV incentive schemes in Switzerland

Article Article scientifique Article Distributional justice, effectiveness, and costs of current and alternative solar PV incentive schemes in Switzerland eng 2024-05-20 2024-05-20 author Soubelet Amaia 417485 author Torne Diaz De Heredia Alexandre 983803 Forel Communs (FOREL) author Thalmann Philippe 0000-0001-7200-3241 author Trutnevyte Evelina 0000-0002-1716-6192 892077 Forel Communs (FOREL) 064075 10.1088/1748-9326/ad4dba 1748-9326 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad4dba Like many other countries, Switzerland offers various incentives to promote residential solar PV, but not all households have equal access to them. Using a microsimulation approach based on merged data from the Household Budget Survey and the Household Energy Demand Survey, we evaluate the current Swiss incentive scheme in terms of how equally the Internal Rates of Return of PV installations, the amounts of obtainable incentives, and the saving months to accumulate the investment are distributed across households. The current, regionally heterogeneous scheme is then compared with alternative, nationally uniform designs based on the required public spending, effectiveness in promoting profitable and affordable PV, and distributional equality. The current scheme leads to a large disparity in the economic profitability of installations and incentive amounts obtainable across various socio-demographics. Larger, the highest-income, and rural households can obtain more incentives and install more profitable PV systems. Lower-income households must save the longest to install PV. Incentive schemes with a nationally uniform investment grant or a feed-in tariff threshold could offer a good alternative to the current scheme in terms of justice, public spending, and effectiveness. The insights on heterogeneous versus uniform PV incentives and the developed methodology could be transferred elsewhere. Solar photovoltaic Policy incentives Distributional justice Inequalities Policy evaluation Dewey 550 Dewey 333.7-333.9 41 Département F.-A. Forel des sciences de l'environnement et de l'eau 153 18 Institut des sciences de l'environnement 0DB false 1245 FORE10 Renewable Energy Systems 938 ISE Pôle Sciences 945 ISE Energie Environmental research letters 7c2a6022-9e8d-465c-ab7f-3048dfcec65e Article (Published version) Public Soubelet_2024_Environ._Res._Lett._1.pdf 1913453 application/pdf CC BY-4.0 1c5e268ef413143d3041b77dcc56a66f732db548248adaef94fc6377d221538f openAccess Faculté des sciences / Section des sciences de la Terre et de l'Environnement / Département F.-A. Forel des sciences de l'environnement et de l'eau Centres et instituts / Institut des sciences de l'environnement

Title	Published in	Access level	OA Policy	Year	Views	Downloads

Distributional justice, effectiveness, and costs of current and alternative solar PV incentive schemes in Switzerland	Environmental research letters			2024	187	442

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Soubelet, Amaia