The impact of supply structure on solar home system installations in rural off-grid areas
Published in Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 2021
This paper investigates the impact of market concentration on solar home system installations in rural off-grid energy markets of Bangladesh. We use an extensive dataset that includes 4.11 million solar home systems installed in 503 markets over 15 years (2003–2017). Figure 1 displays the distribution of solar home systems across thanas over time. We show, as depicted in Figure 2, that an increase in the degree of market concentration reduces both the number and the total capacity of installed solar home systems after controlling for relevant demand- and supply-side factors. We find heterogeneous effects of market concentration depending on the size of the installed solar home system and customer group. Our study emphasizes the importance of markets in the emergence and diffusion of renewable energy technologies.
Fig1: Distribution of the share of solar home system installations across thanas over time.
Fig 2: Effects of market concentration on the number of installed solar home systems.
Citation: Zaman, R. and Borsky, S. (2021) The impact of supply structure on solar home system installations in rural off-grid areas. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 40: 625-644.