| Author: | Ji, Weiyu |
| Title: | Critical influential factors and incentive schemes for the adoption of smart home energy technology by urban residents in China |
| Advisors: | Chan, H. W. Edwin (BRE) Yung, Hiu Kwan Esther (BRE) Chau, Chi-kwan (BSE) |
| Degree: | Ph.D. |
| Year: | 2020 |
| Subject: | Home automation -- China Intelligent buildings -- China Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Department of Building and Real Estate |
| Pages: | xv, 209 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | In an era of flourishing development of information and communication technology, building smart city has been recognized as a promising strategy to achieve the sustainability and equality of future society. From the micro-aspect, smart home is a vital constituent part of smart city, relating to the health and quality of life of urban residents, and the effectiveness of smart home energy technology has been convinced by lots of research in saving residential energy as well as improving the safety, living comfort and convenience. China has a huge market for the development of SHET; however, the household penetration rate in China is still at a low level. If to accelerate the diffusion of SHET through urban residents, some critical issues must be figured out, including resident's perceptions about smart technology, the significant driving factors of adoption intention, as well as the possible incentive schemes formulated by government, which is the aim of this study. To achieve the aim, the study has four objectives: 1) to investigate the KPI representing the complicated performance of SHET; 2) to develop measurement scales for investigating the urban resident's adoption intention about SHET; 3) to identify the critical factors influencing the adoption intention of SHET; 4) to propose the incentive schemes that will facilitate the urban residents to adopt SHET. Considering about the macro-environment of economy, policy, industry development and demographic, Guangdong is the most suitable to be selected as a targeting area to conduct this study among the 34 provincial regions in China. The outcome of the study will not only be beneficial to the local residents and industry of Guangdong province, but also could become an example for other provinces in China. The research objectives have been achieved by comprehensive literature review, questionnaire survey, contingent valuation and various data analysis techniques. Through literature review, totally twelve key performance indicators (KPIs) were identified to represent the performance of SHET; and the integration of theory of planned behavior with norm activation model was developed to compose the theoretical backbone of the study. On the basis of the KPIs and theoretical backbone, a measurement scale was developed to evaluate respondent's attitude and perceptions relevant with the adoption intention of SHET. After data collection, the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was applied, whose results finalized the six factors relating with adoption intention, and named as attitude towards technical performance (ATTP), attitude towards economic performance (ATEP), attitude towards risk resistance (ATRR), perceived behavior control (PBC), subjective norm (SN), and personal norm (PN); besides, the measurement indicators associated with each factor were also confirmed by EFA. The PLS-SEM results specified four significant positive factors influencing the adoption intention of SHET: ATTP, PBC, SN, and PN. However, another two factors, including ATEP and ATRR did not exhibit any significant impact onto the adoption intention. Based on the PLS-SEM results, three incentive schemes were proposed, including price subsidy, time of use (TOU) pricing plan, and community energy saving campaign. Together with the scenario of business as usual (BAU), the four scenarios were analyzed to discover the effects of the proposed incentive schemes onto resident's willingness to pay for SHET. The results of ordered logit regression revealed that all the three proposed schemes would be effective and price subsidy appeared to be the strongest. This study not only contributes to the literature on the topic of social acceptance of smart technology, but also helps the smart technology providers to understand the users of SHET and provide suggestions to policy makers on the promotion of smart technology into urban residents. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
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