Residential Consumers in the Energy Transition: Essays on Network Integration, Demand Dynamics, and Social Interactions.

The energy transition is often presented as a technological and infrastructural challenge, yet its success ultimately depends on millions of decentralized decisions made by residential households. As energy systems evolve, households no longer act merely as passive consumers, they produce electricity, invest in new technologies, and adjust their consumption in response to economic incentives. This thesis asks how these household decisions, as consumers, producers, and investors, shape collective outcomes in the energy transition. It combines theoretical modeling, large-scale administrative data, and econometric methods tailored to the persistence, endogeneity, and spatial dependence of residential energy behavior.

The thesis highlights three key mechanisms. First, decentralized electricity injection from rooftop photovoltaic systems creates network externalities that households do not internalize, leading to costly grid reinforcement instead of more efficient flexibility solutions. Second, residential natural gas demand exhibits strong short-run inertia driven by habits and equipment constraints, while price responsiveness increases over time as households adjust behavior and investments. Third, photovoltaic diffusion is influenced by peer effects that evolve with market maturity and policy support, strengthening early adoption but weakening, and sometimes reversing, over time.

Together, these findings show that the energy transition is not the simple aggregation of individual choices but a collective and evolving process, pointing to the need for adaptive, context-specific, and system-aware policies. Ultimately, the transition must happen with people rather than to them.