The willingness of Dutch citizens to participate in a prosumer community: a stated choice experiment

The demand for energy in the world is continually rising. The local prosumer communities can be wellplaced to identify local energy needs, establish and support initiatives to reduce the energy demand. This paper aims to understand people’s willingness to participate in a prosumer community and the influential factors based on socio-demographic characteristics and attitudes. For that purpose, a stated choice experiment is designed to measure the preferences of Dutch citizens to participate in a prosumer community. In this research, two alternatives are presented to the respondents: own initiative and outsourcing of energy efficient implementations. In addition to the stated choice experiment, environmental statements were given to the respondents to assess their environmental attitudes. As a result of the data collection, 184 respondenses are obtained. A latent class model is used to analyse the data and rho-square is found to be 0.264. According to the results, two groups can be identified respectively as enthousiasts and conservatives with regard to willingness to participate in a prosumer community. In terms of socio-demographics and attitudes, there are statistically significant differences between the groups. These results are found to be useful to promote bottom-up initiatives and to suggest policies in order to form prosumer communities in local territories.