The Role of Monetary Evaluation and Social Pressure Within the Residential Rooftop Photovoltaic Systems Diffusion Model PVact

Private households account for 25.8% of the EU’s final energy consumption and have a rooftop photovoltaic (PV) potential of 680 TWh/year, making them key players in climate change mitigation. Unlike institutional actors, household decisions are influenced by non-rational factors such as opinion dynamics, societal and peer pressure, perceptions, preferences, advertisement and numerous cognitive factors. Understanding their decision-process and their influence on each other and the system overall is paramount for policy making and successful product launch planning, making it informative for strategies of policy makers and companies. To model sustainable product diffusion in a flexible manner, we developed the agent-based innovation diffusion framework IRPact and implemented the granular rooftop PV diffusion model PVact as a case study for the diffusion of PV systems in private households. Most models focus on explanation or prediction; however, this requires low uncertainty and a detailed understanding of the phenomena under study. In contrast, explorative modeling is suited for studying the dynamics of systems of high uncertainty. As the influence and relative strength of different decision factors on the adoption decision of private households in municipal context is not well understood, explorative modeling suggests to be a promising approach to their investigation. Through evaluating extensive simulations with a focus on the interplay of monetary evaluation, normative pressure, agent attitudes, opinion dynamics and social network parameters, we found a high sensitivity of the system to normative pressure and opinion dynamics. Variation of normative pressure showed strong phase transitions, where opinion dynamics and financial evaluation exhibited more gradual behavior. Contrary to most existing literature, the system showed no sensitivity to the variation of network parameters.