Differences in adoption factors of photovoltaic power systems between businesses and families in Taiwan

In response to environmental issues plaguing humankind today, countries all over the world are in the process of actively and continuously implementing many policy measures to promote applications of renewable energy. Among these, solar photovoltaic power is currently the most commonly applied renewable energy technology all over the world. Therefore, the key factors driving the installation of solar photovoltaic power generating systems have become an important subject for consideration while drafting policies. The main purpose of this study is to construct a model comprising the key factors involved in the adoption of a photovoltaic power generating system for businesses and families in Taiwan. We used a specially devised questionnaire for data collection, and chose users who have installed such a system as assessment respondents. The adoption factors contained four aspects-product, environmental, installation, and government-and there were 13 factors in total, including system costs, installation space, feed-in tariff prices, laws and regulations, etc. We conducted a pairwise comparison and assessment of the importance of each factor for 10 businesses and 10 families that had adopted the photovoltaic power generating system. After quantifying it, we calculated the relative weight and ranked them in order to assess the priority among the key factors. The results showed that the key prioritized adoption factors were different between businesses and families. For instance, “laws and regulations” was a priority factor for businesses. However, for family users, this factor ranked last in their list of global weights. For families, system cost was a crucial factor, but it did not appear within the top five adoption factors for businesses. This led us to propose a set of suggestions customized for these two sets of users, aimed towards promoting the application of the technology on a large scale throughout Taiwan.