The impact of attribute preferences on adoption timing: The case of photo-voltaic (PV) solar cells for household electricity generation
By Towhidul Islam, Nigel Meade. 2013
126 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We are concerned with micro-generation, individual households generating electricity using a renewable technology. We focus on modeling the adoption probability of photo-voltaic solar panels by households. Using data from Ontario, Canada where a generous feed-in-tariff is available to households generating electricity from solar panels, we measure household level preferences for panels and use these preferences along with household characteristics to predict adoption time intentions. We use discrete choice experiments to measure household level preferences and establish a causal link between the attributes of the technology and adoption time intentions using discrete time survival mixture analysis. Significant preferences included lower cost, greater energy savings and lower fossil fuel inflation. The conditional (hazard) probability of adoption at a particular time given no previous adoption showed that the attribute preferences had intuitively reasonable effects. The hazard probabilities allow us to compute the cumulative probability of adoption over a 10-year period per household. Technology awareness has a significant effect on the adoption probability, reinforcing the need for effective education. Our approach indicates the level of heterogeneity in preferences, particularly high for investment criteria and CO2 emissions. These findings suggest that education campaigns should explain more about investment criteria, feed-in tariffs and environmental effects.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ee2286c4ec00ad209938bc4f0ec6caab783c46fe
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In Economics and Econometrics
- John M. Rose
- Riccardo Scarpa
- M. Thiene
- Michele Moretto
- R. Cavalli
- Cristiano Franceschinis
- Stephane Hess
- David A. Hensher
In Management Science and Operations Research
In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Citations in the corpus
- Distributed solar and environmental justice: Exploring the demographic and socio-economic trends of residential PV adoption in California (2019, background): “In recent years, econometric, agent-based, regression and other models have identified key demographic, socioeconomic, and behavioral variables that influence domestic PV diffusion, including income, education, age, ethnicity, family size, owner occupancy, peer effects, and of course, access to fina”
- Adoption of renewable heating systems: An empirical test of the diffusion of innovation theory (2017, result): “Our results show the importance of investment and operating costs and are consistent with the findings of earlier studies [12], [13], [15], [83], [84], that have emphasized the relevance of economic factors in the choice of heating system and microgeneration technology.”