Gap between words and actions: Empirical study on consistency of residents supporting renewable energy development in China

Highlights: • Wide gap between actual behavior and oral willingness. • Analyze the factors affecting the consistency of willingness and behavior. • The urban-rural differences affect the consistency. • To narrow the gap can improve the support on renewable energy development. With the increasing concern about energy sustainable policies, the words (willingness) and actions (behavior) of residents to support the renewable energy development have attracted lots of attention. However, most current studies focused on the willingness or behavior separately, ignoring the consistency between them. Given the wide gap between consumers' actual behavior and their willingness to support renewable energy found by a national energy survey in 2016, this paper aims to empirically explore the factors influencing the consistency between the willingness and behavior of Chinese residents through a bivariate-probit model. The empirical results indicate that socio-economic factors, socio-demographic factors and subjective factors have significant influences on residents' consistency to support renewable energy development. Among them, subjective factors play the most important role. When the full sample is divided into a rural group and an urban group, it shows that income, education and energy supply satisfaction have more impacts on rural residents, while environmental concern and carbon emission knowledge affect urban residents by a larger magnitude. This paper provides important policy implications on how to guide residents willing to support renewable energy to take real actions in their life.