Volland, Benjamin

2017, Weber, Sylvain, Burger, Paul, Farsi, Mehdi, Martinez-Cruz, Adan L., Puntiroli, Michael, Schubert, Iljana, Volland, Benjamin

The Swiss Household Energy Demand Survey (SHEDS) has been developed as part of the research agenda of the Competence Center for Research in Energy, Society, and Transition (SCCER CREST). It is designed to collect a comprehensive description of the Swiss households’ energy-related behaviors, their longitudinal changes and the existing potentials for future energy demand reduction. The survey has been planned in five annual waves thus generating a rolling panel dataset of 5,000 respondents per wave. The first two waves of SHEDS were fielded in April 2016 and April-May 2017. This paper elaborates on SHEDS's general objectives, design, and implementation. It also reports a series of practical examples of how the datasets are being used in empirical analyses.

2013, Volland, Benjamin

2010, Volland, Benjamin

2017, Tilov, Ivan, Volland, Benjamin, Farsi, Mehdi

This article explores the interactions between direct and embodied energy requirements of households in Switzerland in order to assess the net impacts of standard energy policies focusing exclusively on direct energy use. For this purpose, we estimate direct and embodied energy demand of Swiss households by combining consumption data of a national expenditure survey with corresponding data on energy intensity mainly from life-cycle analysis. We find strong evidence of complementarity between direct and grey energy by first estimating model parameters in a system of equations setup. In particular, the analysis of various socio-economic and psychological determinants allows us to identify a non-linear relationship between energy demand and income, which suggests that energy possesses certain “luxury features” that go beyond staple resources. An additional indication that households in Switzerland use direct and indirect energy in a complementary manner is provided by the coefficient of cross-equation correlation of residuals in our system. Finally, we analyze the causal relationship between both energy domains by the method of instrumental variables and find indicative evidence of a positive causal effect of embodied on direct energy demand, but not the other way round. From a policy perspective, our findings are important as they suggest that the wide-spread policies targeting direct energy consumption are unlikely to cause a substantial shift in household energy demand from the direct to the indirect domain.

2012, Volland, Benjamin

2016, Volland, Benjamin

2012, Volland, Benjamin