 So our research question is actually how the structure of electricity supply in different countries is related to the well-being of the citizens or more specifically whether there is such a relationship and then if there is how it does look like in more detail. The background to this kind of research is the fact that many countries in Europe and also worldwide are currently undertaken restructuring of their electricity supply or partly also energy supply more generally partly driven by the phenomenon of climate change. Much of the greenhouse gases is related to energy use and what we observe is that different countries pursue quite different strategies in this regard for example in Germany and also in Switzerland there is the strategy of the so-called energy vendor which entails that renewable energies are going to be phased into the system in an accelerated fashion whereas nuclear power is going to be phased out and coal of course as well. If we look at France and the United Kingdom in comparison to that they also try to minimize greenhouse gases but their strategy is to stick to nuclear power and even to build new nuclear power stations. Now the aspect which we study is of course not is there a direct relationship between those structures and the well-being of the citizens but rather an indirect one because the different supply technologies have their different characteristics their advantages and drawbacks which relate to the costs and the environmental aspects and also to safety and nuclear safety issues. For example coal which is a big driver of greenhouse gases is a relatively inexpensive way of producing energy but it's a dirty one it's associated not only with greenhouse gases but also with air pollution which may be detrimental to health. On the other hand the renewable energies they avoid those difficulties but they are relatively expensive or at least they were relatively expensive in the past and with respect to nuclear power there is the unresolved issue of nuclear waste disposal and also there is the fear or the perception that this is a risky technology this latter perception was spurred of course by the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima in Japan in 2011 and therefore the question arises as to how those technologies are to be evaluated in a comparative fashion and our specific approach to addressing this question is to ask whether there are relationships between those technologies and their characteristics on the one hand and the well-being of the citizens on the other. So having described our research question of course the question arises how can we really measure citizen well-being or if you want to put it that way how can we measure welfare it's well known that over much of the 20th century economists have quite have been quite skeptical about the possibility to measure utility or welfare in any meaningful way and much of economic research was in fact was in fact able to be conducted without having to really do that but on the other hand there remain several questions for which it is quite useful to have an empirical measure for well-being and what has come to be established over the last two decades or so and has been accepted even in economics was that it is possible to use subjective data from social surveys which typically ask for people's life satisfaction as an empirical proxy to measure welfare there has been complementary research for example by psychologists which led to the conclusion that those data are really something reliable and sound and increasingly this was being introduced in economics as well for example there have been studies of the relationship between well-being in this subjective sense and some macro economic indicators and what we do is to conduct a similar analysis with respect to the electricity supply structure so we ask whether we can establish a statistical relationship between the life satisfaction of the citizens and those aspects of electricity supply specifically we use data for about 140,000 individuals in 25 European countries starting from 2002 those data were taken from a survey which is conducted regularly the European social survey and using these data and combining them with information on the electricity supply structure in the different countries permitted us to conduct and to establish whether there are such statistical relationships always keeping in mind that of course correlations are to be taken with care so it is very important to control for potentially confounding factors for example it could be that renewable energies are more widespread in rich countries and this tells us that such characteristics and potentially confounding factors are to be included in our analysis but in the end what we do is to run so-called life satisfaction regressions where we have the life satisfaction as the dependent variable we have the shares of the different electricity supply technologies as our main dependent variable and of course we have a whole battery of control variables which give us that methodological safety that I just described in our research there are quite a couple of findings some of which I would describe as the big points and then of course there are also some more differentiated types of analysis so the main finding is that is a finding which is not so straightforward namely that there is in fact a systematic and statistically significant relationship between the supply structure and well-being and then of course the interesting question is how does this relationship look like and looking at it from this point of view what we did find is that certain types of renewable energies are in fact associated with more well-being the supplies in particular to solar energy and wind energy and also it applies to for example natural gas whereas electricity generation from coal and from nuclear power plants is more disliked in terms of citizen well-being and if we look at all of those general results from a still somewhat more specific point of view then we can for example find that not all of the nuclear energies are alike whereas solar and wind power are positively related to well-being this does not apply for example to biomass because for example biomass plants are associated with odor nuisance for example and even if we look at wind energy we find that when you have a wind park in your in your neighborhood or in your in your region then this typically goes with lower subjective well-being but when we now try to align the two levels of analysis the macro level so to speak and the micro level with one another then we find there are some negative aspects of wind energy but when we compare this type of technology with nuclear energy or coal-based electricity generation then overall on balance those negative aspects of wind power are not as important to undermine the general positive effect that we found for the new kinds of renewable energies like wind and solar energy and especially what one can also add is the fact that the negative effects from wind parks are transient mainly they disappear after some three or four years after the construction of the wind parks and this is something which also contributes to the overall result that there's a relatively favorable effect of the those types of technologies at least in the intermediate to long run as far as the relevance of our research is concerned maybe one can note that using such subjective data is not only a trend in research as I explained it previously but it is also something which has spilled over to the political sphere for example using such measures of well-being has been advocated by some publications of the OECD the UK Office of Statistics has also embraced using or at least specifying and showing such data and also in France there has been a commission established by the then-president Sakuzi which was whose aim it was to think about alternative measures or complementary measures for the traditional national accounts and in those exercises the use of subjective data was also something which was recommended and looking at it from this perspective our research which applies this to a question of energy supply I think fits in quite well not just with with the research climate but also with its perception in the political sphere and in fact what we did find namely that there is a clear relationship a significant and systematic relationship between questions of energy policy and citizen well-being or if you want to call it welfare then I think this is something which is indeed something that is relevant in particular against the background mentioned in the beginning that there are those restructurings of the energy supply structure going on in many countries if we look at the future I think there are quite some aspects of our research area that could be considered in a more detailed way for example up to this point we assume that people in all countries that we studied have the same relationship towards the electricity supply but of course that might be different in different countries and this is something that one could look at another point that may be worthwhile is that the important aspects of the energy transition is not just only the supply the generation of electricity but it's also the transmission and we know that there are many many public debates about high voltage power lines for example so therefore it would be quite interesting to look at this as well other aspects are how did changes in the costs for example of photovoltaic energy which dropped considerably in the last couple of years how did this change the relationship between well-being and the different supply structures and therefore I think there is quite some potential for future research along those lines which we started to study in a first step so to speak