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Über 80 Prozent des Endenergieverbrauchs der Haushalte in Deutschland wird für Raumwärme und Warmwasser verwendet. Da die Mehrheit der installierten Heizsysteme nach wie vor auf fossilen Energieträgern basiert, trägt der Gebäudesektor substanziell zu den nationalen Treibhausgasemissionen bei. Im vergangenen Jahr waren es rund 117 Mio. t CO2-Äquivalente. Bis zum Jahr 2030 soll der Ausstoß laut Klimaschutzplan 2050 auf 72 Mio. t CO2 reduziert werden, 2050 soll der Gebäudesektor nahezu klimaneutral sein. Angesichts sehr langer Investitionszyklen bei Gebäuden sind das ambitionierte Ziele. Um diese zu erreichen, setzt die Bundesregierung in ihrem neuen Klimaschutzprogramm auf eine Kombination von Förderprogrammen, Ordnungsrecht, einer CO2-Bepreisung sowie Information und Beratung. Das einzig wirklich Neue in diesem Maßnahmenpaket ist die Einführung einer expliziten Bepreisung von CO2-Emissionen, die nicht unter dem EU Emissionshandelssystem (EHS) reguliert werden - ein Schritt, der von Ökonomen lange gefordert wurde. Leider lassen es die Pläne der Bundesregierung nicht zu, dass die CO2-Bepreisung kurzfristig ihr volles Potenzial entfalten kann. Dieses ZEW policy brief liefert eine kritische Einordnung des Klimaschutzprogramms im Gebäudesektor. Anhand aktueller Erkenntnisse der Wirtschaftsforschung diskutiert es Nachteile von Förderprogrammen und ordnungsrechtlichen Maßnahmen und zeigt zugleich künftigen Forschungsbedarf auf. More than 80 per cent of the individual energy consumption of households in Germany is used for heating and hot water. Since the majority of installed heating systems still run on fossil fuels, the buildings sector accounts for a substantial share of national greenhouse gas emissions. Last year the sector emitted around 117 million tonnes of CO2 equivalents. The aim of the German Climate Action Plan 2050 is to reduce emissions to 72 million tonnes of CO2 and to make the buildings sector almost climate neutral by 2050. These are quite ambitious goals, considering that the investment cycles for buildings are very long. In its new climate protection programme, the federal government intends to achieve these goals with the help of support programmes, regulation, CO2 pricing, information and advice. The only real novelty about this package is the introduction of an explicit pricing of CO2 emissions that are not regulated under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) - a measure that has long been demanded by economists. Unfortunately, the German government's plans inhibit CO2 pricing from developing its full potential in the short term. This ZEW policy brief provides a critical assessment of the Climate Action Plan with regard to the buildings sector. On the basis of current findings of economic research, the policy brief discusses the disadvantages of funding programmes and regulatory measures, and points out where further research is needed in the future.

In this paper, we investigate the effect of the state-level renewable heating mandate for existing homes in Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany's third largest federal state. The mandate requires homeowners to supply at least 10 % of their heat demand with renewable energy when they replace their existing heating system. To assess the impact of the renewable heating standard on the uptake of renewable heating systems, we use unique data on a federal government subsidy scheme and exploit geographic differences in state laws over time. We find no evidence of an effect of the mandate even after restricting distance to the state border and refining the data set through matching on population and building characteristics. These findings are unchanged, when we allow effects to vary across space or over time. While energy efficiency and renewable standards are often criticized for not being cost-effective, our results challenge the widespread view that a standard is nevertheless successful in achieving its policy goal.

Flood insurance helps to cope with the risk of flooding, but take-up rates are relatively low. Insurance density could rise if index-based insurance (IBI) were provided as an alternative to traditional damage-based insurance (DBI). We analyze whether there is potential for private demand for IBI in Germany. We use data from a discrete choice experiment combined with damage data for a major flood in 2013. We find IBI to attract similar customers as DBI, while DBI is preferred on average. Our results suggest that not many new customers would enter the market, once IBI were available.

One of the major challenges that our world faces today and in the future is human-induced climate change. The primary cause of global warming, leading to climate change, is the burning of fossil fuels for energy and transport, which increases the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Energy efficiency and renewable energy sources are considered by many as the proverbial "silver bullet" to avoid the worst climate change scenarios. However, the support for and success of any effort to improve energy efficiency and expand renewable energies strongly depends on preferences and choices of consumers. In four distinct but related essays, the present doctoral thesis examines consumer preferences for alternative-fuel vehicles and building energy retrofits. It makes use of data from two dedicated Germany-wide surveys, one of car buyers and the other of house owners. Each of these surveys included a discrete choice experiment, where respondents were faced with hypothetical choice situations. The car buyers were asked to select the car they preferred most from sets of seven vehicles with different fuel types. The house owners, on the other hand, first selected their preferred retrofit alternative from binary choice sets and then indicated whether they would actually undertake the selected retrofit activity if it were on the market. Similar choice experiments have been used before in transportation and energy research. But in contrast to previous studies, this work includes a wider range of alternative fuels and explicitly considers environmental benefits of energy retrofits. Based on the choice data, barriers to the widespread adoption of alternative-fuel vehicles and building energy retrofits are identified, and it is examined to what extent environmental aspects influence consumer choice behavior in Germany. The doctoral thesis confirms existing evidence on the impact of fuel availability on demand for alternative-fuel vehicles, primarily coming from North America, in the German context (Chapter 2). It makes important contributions to the growing, but heterogeneous literature that seeks to elicit willingness to pay for carbon abatements, carbon offsets, or climate policy in general (Chapters 3 and 4). Finally, it attempts to explain the persistent low retrofit rate in Germany and makes suggestions on how to stimulate energy retrofits in an effective and cost-efficient way (Chapter 5).

Previous literature on the distribution of willingness to pay has focused on its heterogeneity distribution without addressing exact interval estimation. In this paper we derive and analyze Bayesian confidence sets for quantifying uncertainty in the determination of willingness to pay for carbon dioxide abatement. We use two empirical case studies: household decisions of energy-efficient heating versus insulation, and purchase decisions of ultralow- emission vehicles. We first show that deriving credible sets using the posterior distribution of the willingness to pay is straightforward in the case of deterministic consumer heterogeneity. However, when using individual estimates, which is the case for the random parameters of the mixed logit model, it is complex to define the distribution of interest for the interval estimation problem. This latter problem is actually more involved than determining the moments of the heterogeneity distribution of the willingness to pay using frequentist econometrics. A solution that we propose is to derive and then summarize the distribution of point estimates of the individual willingness to pay under different loss functions.

In this paper we use Bayes estimates of a multinomial probit model with fully flexible substitution patterns to forecast consumer response to ultra-low-emission vehicles. In this empirical application of the probit Gibbs sampler, we use stated-preference data on vehicle choice from a Germany-wide survey of potential light-duty-vehicle buyers using computer-assisted personal interviewing. We show that Bayesian estimation of a multinomial probit model with a full covariance matrix is feasible for this medium-scale problem. Using the posterior distribution of the parameters of the vehicle choice model as well as the GHK simulator we derive the choice probabilities of the different alternatives. We first show that the Bayes point estimates of the market shares reproduce the observed values. Then, we define a base scenario of vehicle attributes that aims at representing an average of the current vehicle choice situation in Germany. Consumer response to qualitative changes in the base scenario is subsequently studied. In particular, we analyze the effect of increasing the network of service stations for charging electric vehicles as well as for refueling hydrogen. The result is the posterior distribution of the choice probabilities that represent adoption of the energy-effcient technologies.

International shipping is an important emitter of greenhouse gases. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) is discussing different approaches to reduce maritime CO2 emissions, in particular market-based mechanisms. In this paper, we assess potential implications of a maritime emission trading scheme (ETS) on the organisation and operations of shipping companies, primarily on the basis of a case study involving ship operators. Our results suggest that there is no knock-out criterion why a cap-andtrade approach should not work in the shipping sector in practice. A maritime ETS has the potential to engage this sector into cost-efficient emission reduction if designed to account for the special characteristics of the international shipping industry.

In this paper we analyze the impact of service station availability on the demand for alternative-fuel vehicles and the consumers’ willingness to pay for an enlarged fueling infrastructure. We examine a stated preferences choice experiment conducted as a CAPI survey with about 600 interviews of potential car buyers in Germany and estimate the coefficients of a discrete choice model. We simulate different scenarios and analyze how individual choice probabilities for alternative fuel-types are changing with a modified fueling infrastructure. In our scenarios hybrids, LPG/CNG and hydrogen will be real alternatives to the existing conventional technologies. However, biofuels and electric power trains are well behind even in a situation where their infrastructure is equally developed. Moreover, on the basis of our model we compute what increases in fixed or variable costs consumers of different income groups are willing to accept for an increasing station density.

Residential buildings strongly contribute to global CO2 emissions due to the high energy demand for electricity and heating, particularly in industrialised countries. Within the EU, decentralised heat generation is of particular relevance for future climate policy, as its emissions are not covered by the EU ETS. We conducted a choice experiment concerning energy retrofits for existing houses in Germany. In the experiment, the approximately 400 sampled house owners could either choose a modern heating system or an improved thermal insulation for their home. We used standard and mixed logit specifications to analyse the choice data. We found environmental benefits to have a significant impact on choices of heating systems. However, they played no role in terms of insulation choices. Based on the estimated mixed logit model, we further obtained WTP measures for CO2 savings.

Motorised individual transport strongly contributes to global CO2 emissions, due to its intensive usage of fossil fuels. Current political efforts addressing this issue (i.e. emission performance standards in the EU) are directed towards car manufacturers. This paper focuses on the demand side. It examines whether CO2 emissions per kilometre is a relevant attribute in car choices. Based on a stated preference experiment among potential car buyers from Germany, different mixed logit specifications are estimated. In addition, distributions of willingness to pay measures for an abatement of CO2 emissions are obtained. The results suggest that the emissions performance of a car matters substantially, but its consideration varies heavily across the sampled population. In particular, some evidence on gender, age and education effects on climate concerns is provided.