Consumer renewable energy technology adoption decision-making

Abstract

Climate change and environmental problems are of major concern to governments, organisations, and consumers. This stresses the need for a transition towards clean renewable energy systems. To enable the diffusion of cleaner energy technology it is not enough to just have supportive policies in place. The challenge is to ensure that consumers adopt them. This article integrates insights from different research traditions into a research model to analyse consumers’ adoption decision-making behaviour. The innovation-diffusion model by Rogers was used and hypotheses from environmental psychological models were later added. A survey was conducted among householders to assess the adoption of solar heating systems in the Metn neighbourhood in Lebanon (N = 200). The results revealed that adopters and non-adopters differ significantly according to socio-demographic factors, such as income and household size.
The study confirmed the significance of typical variables of the diffusion of innovation model, such as relative advantage, observability, independent judgment-making, and novelty-seeking; even when testing integrative analytical models. Furthermore, the results indicate that, by integrating hypotheses from environmental psychology models to the diffusion of innovation model, a reasonable fit was achieved which is higher than the value of each model tested separately. The results can be of use to policy makers. The article ends with suggestions for future research.