Understanding Residential Grid-tied PV Customers and Their Willingness to Pay Today's Costs: A Qualitative Assessment

This project began when the Colorado Governor's Office of Energy Conservation (OEC) and utility companies considered making residential grid-tied photovoltaic (PV) systems available in Colorado. The idea was to find 50 homes owned by people willing to pay the costs of grid-tied PV systems without batteries -- $8,000 or $12,000 for a 2- or 3-kW system, respectively. These costs representedtwo-thirds of the actual installed cost of $6 per watt. The other would be subsidized. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and OEC partnered to conduct a market assessment to identify residential customers willing to pay these amounts for grid-tied PV and to explore their reasons for wanting to participate, their preferred product attributes, and their attitudes toward utilityinvolvement in PV. This paper reports on the results from the qualitative phase of the research, based in the diffusion-of-innovation research tradition, which serves as the foundation for a subsequent homeowner survey. The purposive sample of 120 Colorado households was developed and lengthy face-to-face focused interviews were completed. Focused open-ended interviewing yields rich volunteeredinformation. Nearly 9,500 responses were coded from the interviews. This paper reports results on (a) who these respondents were sociodemographically and (b) what they said about their motivations and their attitudes toward utility company involvement in grid-tied PV. These innovators and early adopters are a niche market for grid-tied PV systems. The study's results provide a foundation fordesigning renewable electricity products and programs and for more systematic survey and market research.