Researching the willingness of island residents to become self-sufficient: Deploying Discrete Choice Models on Schiermonnikoog

Schiermonnikoog, just as a lot of other islands worldwide, aims to become energy self-sufficient by 2025. This requires major changes to the current electricity system. As it is desirable to involve the local population to create support for energy self-sufficiency, this paper aims to research the trade-offs that island residents are willing to make to become self-sufficient. This trade-off is formulated as the trade-off between energy self-sufficiency and energy security (consisting of availability, affordability and acceptability). From the results of the deployment of a choice model on Schiermonnikoog it can be concluded that island residents are willing to trade-off (to a certain extent) affordability and availability against self-sufficiency. When it comes to acceptability however, it turns out that island residents very negatively value the deployment of large renewable electricity plants on their island and are therefore not willing to trade-off acceptability against self-sufficiency.Complex Systems Engineering and Management (CoSEM