Last year, I found a research paper on “Social acceptance of solar energy technologies in China – End user’s perspective”. A decade old paper published in 2011.
This paper studied social acceptance of renewable energy among the people of Shandong province of China. Researchers, at first, accumulated information on age of respondent, education, income group. Afterwards, they analyzed public awareness about solar water heater, and solar PV. Utility of these in their lives, and the reasons behind choosing or not choosing them.
It got me thinking, ‘do we have similar study about Indian people’. We definitely need this kind of information. We need to know what Indian populace think about what role solar energy can play in their lives, and what are their requirements that can be fulfilled if solar energy is the way forward. Would it accelerate their living standards?
It appeared there is not any detailed research work on this, or if there is, it is not publicly available. Therefore, I found it essential to conduct a survey on my own to get to know this, and perhaps publish it as well if I reach a certain threshold of sampling data.
However, naïve, now it appears, I went onto a create a survey for this, and sent it to almost everyone I knew. Survey started out with the basic questions such as:
- Name of the city
- Do you already have solar installed?
- If yes, how much you rely on it
- Surface area of living space
- Total occupancy of house
- Income tax slab they fall into
After these, questions were little bit about the types of electric appliances in use, and their usages hours at the peak of its need. I tried my best to not be intrusive or not to make survey tedious, by simply asking about “number of hours appliances are used at its peak” than “approximate hours used in each month”. By knowing peak hours of each appliance, weather/temperature information from internet, and normal distribution, I believed I could get usages for each month.</p>
The complete survery, with a few more other interesting questions afterwards, can be found on this link But, as of now, this survery has not yet reached three figure marks with respondents count.
The lessons one can derive from kind of project is that:
1. It is first of all, essential to have government approval or backing for better outreach.
2. Respondents, perhap, should be monetarily rewarded
3. Surveryors, perhaps, should visit respondents in person. Or all three, or at least two of them.