Information interventions can increase technology adoption through information network restructuring

D Cale Reeves; Matthew Haley; Amara Uyanna; Varun Rai

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.104794

Information interventions can increase technology adoption through information network restructuring

iScience. 2022 Jul 20;25(8):104794. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104794. eCollection 2022 Aug 19.

Authors

D Cale Reeves^{1

2}, Matthew Haley¹, Amara Uyanna¹, Varun Rai^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ LBJ School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin TX, USA.
² School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta GA, USA.
³ Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin TX, USA.

Abstract

The rapid adoption of residential solar photovoltaic (PV) is recasting the role of individual households as a dynamic and potent construct critical for emissions mitigation and resilience of the electricity system. As residential PV enters more risk-averse customer segments, broader deployment of residential PV depends on overcoming both financial and informational barriers to adoption. Fast-changing residential PV technologies and associated policies means there is both lack of information and often misinformation among customers-gaps that are addressed effectively with local, trusted information networks, especially for big-ticket items such as residential PV. Here, we use an extensively validated agent-based model of residential PV adoption to analyze the effectiveness of different information intervention designs in spurring PV diffusion. We show that intervention designs are effective when they balance long-distance connections and local reinforcement, matching the intervention to both the informational needs of potential adopters and the structure of the underlying network.

Keywords: Applied sciences; Green engineering; Solar terrestrial physics.