Abstract
Renewable energy sources (RES) have potentials to address goals of climate change mitigation at the global level. Iran has abundant RES potentials and investment into renewable energy sources can contribute to its socio-economic development and to diversification of its energy mix. Economic and technical capacities but also human factors, such as stakeholders’ views, public and social acceptance, as well as willingness to use RES, willingness to pay for their deployment and to participate in decision-making processes on energy transition, are crucial factors for deployment of RES at scale. These human factors impact development and implementation of energy transition at the national and local governance levels. Deployment of new technology and energy transition can lead to conflicting views, believes and risks perceptions among involved stakeholders but also among people affected by deployment of new technology infrastructure deployment. To be sustainable and acceptable by all social groups, such process should be based on understanding of positions of different stakeholders and development of compromise solutions. It is crucial to understand the views of young people on deployment of RES as young people represent a significant share of population and are future decision makers. Their support and willingness to use RES will be a significant driver for RES deployment in short and medium term. Based on socio cognitive theory this paper examines the patters of behavior of young adults in relation to energy use. The results show positive influence of self-rewarding to encourage young adults to participate in energy transition. Another important driver is expectation of social outcome, which involves existing social norms in the community. Trust to the source of information is another important driver and the level of information about RES has an important influence on the willingness to use them.
Highlights
Production and consumption of energy in today’s world is a very complex issue requiring nexus and coordination of several policies
Energy transition is an actual challenge for Iran, taken into consideration the available potentials for renewable energy generation as well as the willingness of energy policy stakeholders to diversify the currently existing in Iran energy mix
Our results showed that the Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) model is suitable for analysis of the human factors in energy transition
Summary
Production and consumption of energy in today’s world is a very complex issue requiring nexus and coordination of several policies. Economic and social development policies require an increased level of energy generation to cover growing worldwide energy need [1]. At another side, environment protection policies are pointing out to the relation between energy consumption and environmental degradation. Deployment of renewable energies is often recognized as a viable option to meet goals of climate and energy security policies and as a backbone of any transition to decarbonized energy system. The second one is the high level of fossil fuels consumption, which currently represents one of the major challenges for energy transition in Iran [7,8]. It would have potentials to generate from 20 GW to 30 GW of wind power and with more than 300 sunny days and 2,200 kWh of solar irradiance per square meter potentials for solar are very high [6]
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