NCN 2018/29/B/HS4/00069

Diffusion of Alternative Fuel passenger vehicles in Poland: empirical survey of consumers’ preferences and agent-based modeling of market peNEtration (DAFNE)

Grant no.: NCN 2018/29/B/HS4/00069
Funding agency: National Science Centre (NCN), Poland
Funding scheme: OPUS
Funding period: 01.04.2019-31.03.2022 (36 months)
Budget: 473 200 PLN
Title in Polish: Dyfuzja samochodów osobowych wykorzystujących paliwa alternatywne w Polsce: badanie empiryczne preferencji konsumentów oraz modelowanie agentowe rozwoju rynku

Research team:

Principal Investigator (Kierownik):

Anna Kowalska-Pyzalska

Investigators (Wykonawcy):

Joanna Kott
Marek Kott
Rafał Michalski
Jakub Pawłowski
Anna Skowrońska-Szmer

Collaborators (Współpracownicy):

DSC Grupa Badawcza Sp. z o.o.

– Ph.D. / M.Sc. / B.Sc. student

Aims and scope:

Alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) have the potential to reduce gasoline consumption as well as resulting greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants. Successful diffusion of these vehicles will depend on the readiness of the consumer market, which in turn, depend on consumer awareness, attitudes and interests, travel patterns and access to recharging/ refueling infrastructure.

Recently, the Polish government has announced a Plan for Development of Electro-mobility and introduced the Act on Electromobility and Alternative Fuels. As the Report ‘Charging Poland’ indicates, those documents create incentives for the deployment of market of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs) in Poland (i.e. lowered the excise tax on electric cars, enabled drivers of such vehicles to use the bus lanes in cities, removed their paid parking fees, etc.). Already nowadays, according to the reports of the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) the number of BEVs registered in Poland has increased by 130% between the first quarters of 2017 and 2018 (but BEV market share is still close to zero (0.1%)). On the other hand, Polish consumers are mainly interested in hybrid electric vehicles – HEVs. Poland is one of the EU countries with the highest sales rates of HEVs. Hence, in our survey we will focus mainly on those types of light-duty passenger AFVs, like: BEVs, PHEVs and HEVs that have the largest chance of further market development in Poland.

Within this project by the means of a two-part survey on the representative sample of Poles we want to investigate and explore consumers’ social and technical readiness to adopt AFVs. In particular, we plan to: assess consumers’ awareness of AFV technologies; identify and characterize Polish consumer segments based on AFV interest, valuation of attributes, values and lifestyle and to quantify consumers’ valuation of AFV attributes, like: price, driving range and recharging infrastructure. We will use following research methods: questionnaire, design game and stated choice experiment. To analyze consumers’ preferences we will use among others: factor choice analysis, cluster analysis and latent-class model.

Additionally, based on our findings, we want to specify and calibrate an agent-based model (ABM) to simulate and evaluate various policies and scenarios enhancing further diffusion of AFV market (limited to those sorts of light-duty passenger AFVs that are and will be available for Polish consumers). For modelling a complex system consisting of autonomous agents which interact with each other within realistic environments we will resort to Monte Carlo simulations. For code prototyping and scenario analysis we will use Matlab programming environment. Real-world network structures will be also tested within NetLogo platform.

Tasks:

Designing the two-part survey adjusted to the conditions of the passenger AFVs market in Poland
Conducting the two-part survey
Analyzing the results
Building an agent-based model of the passenger AFVs market in Poland
Exploring scenario analysis to identify interventions and policies in which passenger AFVs can be successfully introduced

Publications:

Peer-reviewed articles in JCR-listed journals

2021 (2+), 2020 (2), 2019 (0)

A. Kowalska-Pyzalska, J. Kott, M. Kott (2021) How Much Polish Consumers Know about Alternative Fuel Vehicles? Impact of Knowledge on the Willingness to Buy, Energies 14(5), 1438 (https://doi.org/10.3390/en14051438).
A. Skowrońska-Szmer, A. Kowalska-Pyzalska (2021) Key factors of development of electromobility among microentrepreneurs: a case study from Poland, Energies 14 (3), 764 (https://doi.org/10.3390/en14030764).
K. Bienias, A. Kowalska-Pyzalska, D. Ramsey (2020) What do people think about electric vehicles? An initial study of the opinions of car purchasers in Poland, Energy Reports 6S1, 267-273 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyr.2019.08.05).
A. Kowalska-Pyzalska, J. Kott, M. Kott (2020) Why Polish market of alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) is the smallest in Europe? SWOT analysis of opportunities and threats, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 133, 110076 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2020.110076).

Book chapters

Conference papers

K. Bienias, A. Kowalska-Pyzalska, D. Ramsey (2019) What do people think about electric vehicles? An initial study of the opinions of car purchasers in Poland. ICEER2019 – 6th International Conference on Energy and Environment Research: “Energy and environment: challenges towards circular economy”

Forthcoming publications, submitted papers and work in progress

A. Kowalska-Pyzalska, R. Michalski, M. Kott, A. Skowrońska-Szmer, J. Kott (2021) Consumer preferences towards alternative fuel vehicles. Results from the conjoint analysis, WORking papers in Management Science (WORMS) WORMS/21/02.