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ID:
183627
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Summary/Abstract |
Achieving climate-neutrality requires considerable investment in energy storage systems (ESS) to integrate variable renewable energy sources into the grid. However, investments into ESS are often unprofitable, in particular for grid-scale battery storage and green hydrogen technologies, prompting many actors to call for policy intervention. This study investigates investor-specific risk-return preferences for ESS investment and derives policy recommendations. Insights are drawn from 1,605 experimental investment-related decisions obtained from 42 high-level institutional investors and utility representatives. Results reveal that both investor groups view revenue stacking as key to making ESS investment viable. While the expected return on investment is the most important project characteristic, risk-return preferences for other features diverge between groups. Institutional investors appear more open to exploring new technological ventures (20% of utility respondents would not consider making investments into solar photovoltaic-hydrogen), whereas utilities seem to prefer greenfield projects (23% of surveyed institutional investors rejected such projects). Interestingly, both groups show strong aversion towards energy market price risk. Institutional investors require a premium of 6.87 percentage points and utilities 5.54 percentage points for moving from a position of fully hedged against market price risk to a scenario where only 20% of revenue is fixed, underlining the need for policy support.
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2 |
ID:
150061
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Summary/Abstract |
Citizens own nearly half the renewable energy generation capacity in Germany and have been important drivers of the country's energy transition. In contrast to citizens' important role in financing renewable energies, the energy policy and economics literature has traditionally focused on other investors, such as incumbent energy firms. To close this gap, this paper reports on a large-scale survey of 1,990 German retail investors. Conducting a choice experiment with the subset of 1,041 respondents who expressed an interest in investing in community renewable energy projects, we present a unique dataset allowing for new insights in risk-return expectations of retail investors. We find that apart from return on investment, respondents are particularly sensitive to the minimum holding period and the issuer of community renewable energy investment offerings. A minimum holding period of 10 years implies a risk premium of 2.76% points. A subsequent segmentation analysis shows that two groups of potential community renewable energy investors with different risk-return expectations can be identified: “local patriots” and “yield investors”. In contrast to professional investors, a majority of retail investors use simple decision rules such as calculating payback time or relying on their gut feeling when making investments.
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