Would You Like to Trade Your Energy? A Comparative Survey Experiment on Energy Trading Platforms

Abstract

As energy markets become more decentralised, energy trading platforms are emerging as useful tools to facilitate the coordination of energy consumption and generation, encouraging a more efficient use of renewable energy by residential producers and consumers. By exploring three different European countries, we study the effectiveness of both monetary and non-monetary incentives in fostering energy trade via trading platforms. We use an incentivized survey experiment to evaluate the drivers of consumers’ and prosumers’ willingness to participate in an energy trading platform. We find that the monetary incentive is not necessarily the main reason why people would choose to trade their energy, but other dimensions, such as environmental concerns and independence from the national grid, play an important role.