The price of risk in residential solar PV investment

This project explores how perceived investment risk influences solar photovoltaic (PV) investment decisions by households. The role of risk is still relatively unexplored in the literature but has become very relevant, not just in Switzerland, but all over Europe, due to the phasing out of policies that provide solar investors with a stable revenue stream (e.g. feed-in tariffs) and introduction of alternative support schemes (e.g. investment grants) that imply that some investment risk is borne by residential solar producers. We aim to contribute to this policy debate by investigating the role of households’ risk and time preferences in solar investment decisions.
We collect empirical evidence for this analysis through semi-structured interviews with Swiss households who adopted solar and solar PV installers, as well as through a large scale online survey submitted to a sample of Swiss single- and multifamily-house owners who do not own a solar PV system yet but are interested in purchasing one for their house in the next 5 years.