There’s a unique experiment happening in the Netherlands right now: households in the coastal province of Zeeland are being paid to turn off their solar panels.
Participating households will be asks to disable their solar panels at designated times over the course of a month. The experiment is running through 30 September, and the energy companies behind it, Eneco and Stedin, plan to carry it out on a wider scale in 2025.
As reported by NU.nl, the stated goal of the experiment it to relieve the burden on the electricity grid in the Netherlands by turning their inverters off during peak sunny hours. This is an important problem that comes with some sustainable energy sources, like solar panels: during a sunny day, solar panels generate a lot of energy that the household members cannot use themselves, even if they turn on every appliance in the house! The excess energy then goes back to the grid, overloading it and causing technical problems.
Monetary compensation is offered for individual households to turn off the energy production of their solar panels during sunny moments. We often assume that money motivates people, but in psychological research, it has been demonstrated again and again that offering people financial incentives only works short term.
As long as people are paid for performing the behaviour, they do it. But the moment the financial incentive stops, we see the behaviour slowing down and eventually dropping off, most often to the level that we saw before there was compensation.
Other questions that we need to ask to see if this policy might be potentially effective are:
1) How much are residents paid? In this case, the money given out depends on how often the participating households actually turn off their inverters. But there is debate among behavioural scientists about how much money is motivating enough. Paying too little may lead to low interest from the community and high drop out levels, but paying too much can lead to everyone stopping after the money stops coming.
2) Who are the people that this policy is most relevant to? Solar panels are not something everyone can afford, so it is safe to assume that those who own solar panels are those with higher income and thus are less likely to participate in this initiative for money.
3) What kind of messages are communicated to the households when the initiative is introduced? Is the emphasis on the need to unload the grid to have less technical difficulties? Or is it focused on the need to save money? Or is it about sustainability? We know that acting in a pro-environmental way is something that motivates people to perform sustainable behaviours for much longer stretches of time than, like in this case, for money.
It is not that easy to try and predict whether this initiative would work based on the information that we have, but we would expect the behaviour to drop off significantly when the initiative stops.
How do we ensure that the initiative is successful? Well, that’s where environmental psychologists come in!
Want to hear more about the energy transition and the electrical grid? Check out our podcast episode with Lisa!
Photo: Traci White
