Factors influencing residential rooftop solar PV purchasing decisions in an upmarket estate in South Africa

Abstract

Residential and commercial electricity customers are plagued with rising electricity costs and declining supply availability, forcing them to seek alternative supplies. At the same time, South Africa has a favourable climate and is ranked as one of the countries with the highest solar resource potential in the world. The high solar resource capability and declining costs of residential rooftop solar PV systems make this a viable alternative for customers to minimise the impact of load shedding and rising electricity prices while reducing South Africa's carbon footprint. This descriptive study aimed to understand the factors that influence customers in a residential estate in South Africa with Feed-In Tariffs to decide to adopt rooftop solar PV systems. Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations theory was used as the basis for the study, coupled with Moore's adaptation of Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations theory, which explains the gap between early adopters and late adopters of technology. A self-selecting quantitative study was conducted using all Midstream Estates residents as the population for the study. The results analysed using descriptive statistics and logistic regression analysis to determine the relationship between the dependent variable, adoption decision and the various independent variables. The findings of the study are that personal circumstances such as gender, age, education status, occupation, income and household size were not determiners for adoption together with beliefs, however, attitude towards solar specially on economic benefits affected the adoption decision. Feed-in tariffs did not affect the adoption indicating that other factors were more important including power reliability which was found to increase the likelihood for adoption of residential rooftop solar PV systems.