Investigating the importance of motivations and barriers related to microgeneration uptake in the UK

By P. Balcombe, Danny Rigby, Adisa Azapagic. 2014

184 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Microgeneration technologies such as solar photovoltaics, solar thermal, wind and heat pumps may be able to contribute to meeting UK climate change and energy security targets, but their contribution to UK domestic energy supply remains low. This research uses a best-worst scaling survey of microgeneration adopters, considerers and rejecters (n=291) to determine the relative importance of different motivations and barriers in microgeneration (non) adoption decisions. The most important motivations are earning money from installation, increasing household energy independence and protecting against future high energy costs. Results indicate that the introduction of Feed-in Tariffs has clearly encouraged a new, more financially-motivated, group to install. Financial factors are the most important barriers and of most importance to rejecters is the prospect of losing money if they moved home. The Green Deal was introduced to reduce this barrier, but may instead exacerbate the problem as potential homebuyers are put off purchasing a home with an attached Green Deal debt. The difficulty in finding trustworthy information on microgeneration is also a major obstacle to adoption, particularly for considerers, despite efforts by the government and microgeneration interest groups to reduce this barrier. Self-sufficiency in energy is a more important motivation for those considering or having rejected installation than for adopters. Provision of accessible information and greater emphasis on household self-sufficiency in energy could help improve the uptake.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/76cb279f4df51172cbbad386947330125db1c758

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

1. Emily Schulte
2. Fabian Scheller
3. D. Sloot
4. Thomas Bruckner
5. Sheila Nolan
6. Mark J. O'Malley
7. J. Palm

Citations in the corpus

• Challenges and barriers to demand response deployment and evaluation (2015, background): “The authors in [44] explore the motivations and barriers associated with individual consumer decisions on whether to install microgeneration in their home.”
• Household installation of solar panels – Motives and barriers in a 10-year perspective (2018, background): “Here financial barriers are most often discussed, involving high investment cost, long pay-off time and lack of subsidies (Balcombe et al., 2013; Balcombe et al., 2014; Enlund and Eriksson, 2016; Palm and Tengvard, 2011).”
• Energy self-sufficiency, grid demand variability and consumer costs: Integrating solar PV, Stirling engine CHP and battery storage (2015, background): “However, local battery storage represents an additional upfront cost to the consumer, which is already an important barrier for most who consider installing it [5].”
• A meta-analysis of residential PV adoption: the important role of perceived benefits, intentions and antecedents in solar energy acceptance (2021, background): “The most frequent journals are Energy Policy, Renewable Energy and Applied Energy.”