Abstract
The Netherlands aims at reducing natural gas consumption for heating in the housing sector. Although homeowners are responsible for replacing their heating systems and improving dwelling insulation, they are not always able to make individual decisions. Some projects require group decisions within and between buildings. We use an agent-based modelling and simulation approach to explore how these individual and group decisions would influence natural gas consumption and heating costs in an illustrative neighbourhood, under a set of assumptions. We model individual household preferences over combinations of insulation and heating systems as a lifetime cost calculation with implicit discount rates, and we use quorum constraints to represent group decisions. We model three fiscal policies and a policy to disconnect all dwellings from the natural gas network. Results show that the disconnection policy was the only necessary and sufficient condition to incentivize households to replace their heating systems and that group decisions influenced the alternatives that were chosen. Since results were influenced by group decisions within buildings and by the market discount rate, we recommend further research regarding policies around these topics. Future work can apply our approach to case studies, incorporate new empirical knowledge, and explore group decisions in other contexts.
Highlights
A heat transition is taking place in The Netherlands
Since new buildings must comply with energy performance standards and are built without a natural gas connection, we focus on the stock of buildings that currently uses natural gas for heating
We use an agent-based approach that we proposed in Moncada et al (2017) and Nava Guerrero et al (2019), which is based on the perspectives of socio-technical systems (STS) and complex adaptive systems (CAS)
Summary
Natural gas is widely used in the country to heat the built environment (Beurskens and Menkveld, 2009). Since July 2018, buildings with a relatively low energy con sumption for space heating, i.e. houses and small commercial buildings, should be built without being connected to the natural gas grid The national government aims at making all existing homes free of natural gas by 2050 (Rijksoverheid, 2019a). These goals are in line with those of the European Union to improve the energy performance of buildings and increase the share of renewable energy sources that are used to heat the built environment (European Com mission, 2016)
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