Adoption Of Energy-saving Technologies Research Articles

The role of environmental and financial motivations in the adoption of energy-saving technologies: Evidence from European Union data

This paper investigates whether households’ environmental and financial motivations affect their investments in energy-saving technologies. Exploiting a comprehensive dataset covering 30 European countries, we investigate whether financially motivated and environmentally minded households present different adoption paths. The results show that environmental and financial motivations play an essential role in the decision to adopt energy-saving technologies, thus paving the way for policy actions targeted at enhancing consumer awareness. Our analysis also reveals that environmentally and financially motivated households exhibit different socio-economic profiles. We find that environmentally minded, highly educated households living in urban areas with a large family size are more likely to adopt energy-saving technologies than their counterparts with low levels of education living in rural locations. In addition, their financial situation is an important factor in explaining the adoption patterns of financially motivated households. From a methodological point of view, our analysis exploits both parametric and nonparametric methods. We use stochastic dominance analysis to rank the distribution functions of household behaviours and the logit model to investigate the socio-economic profiles of different groups.

Latent Dirichlet Allocation in Public Procurement Documents Analysis for Determining Energy Efficiency Issues in Construction Works at Polish Universities

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of public procurement documents in the domain of university buildings taken from the e-procurement platform, particularly focusing on their transformation towards more efficient energy consumption. Using a corpus of the titles of the public procurement documents from 2020 to 2022, we used Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for topic modeling to understand the key thematic areas of focus. The methodology presented in this study incorporated a bifurcated approach. This two-stage procedure began with preprocessing and dictionary creation from the corpus of titles of procurement documents. Following this, the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model was employed for topic extraction and trend analysis, thereby providing a comprehensive understanding of the thematic progression in procurement practices over time. Our analysis revealed a shift in emphasis from modernization towards the adoption of energy-saving technologies as well as a growing focus on broader sustainability initiatives. However, a less prevalent topic was adherence to cooling & heating systems, suggesting potential areas for improvement in procurement practices. These findings contribute to the growing body of knowledge on sustainable procurement in university buildings and offer valuable insight for universities to enhance their energy efficiency strategies.

Environmental policies and energy efficiency investments. An industry-level analysis

Energy efficiency is considered a very cost-effective way to mitigate air emissions and improve the economic performance of manufacturing industries. Many countries have implemented measures to increase energy efficiency in industry. These measures include command-and-control and market-based interventions, and they may be specific to a particular firm or sector. Although these policies may have benefits, the results of the empirical analyses of the effects of these interventions on the adoption of energy-saving technologies are not conclusive. The main objective of this paper is to examine the role of different environmental policy measures on energy efficiency investment. We construct a database from several sources for Spanish industries for the period 2010–2017. This gives us information on a broad range of factors and policy instruments that may drive energy efficiency investments. We consider four different instruments: regulation, taxes, subsidies, and tax credits.

Discerning the factors explaining the change in energy efficiency

Due to the high rates of energy consumption and its impact on environment over the last decades, policy decision-makers are increasingly recognising the need to take actions that allow to address problems associated with the deployment of non-renewable resources and climate changes. One field of action has been the promotion of measures that contribute to improve energy efficiency of countries. The purpose of this study is to identify the main factors explaining changes in energy efficiency applying the multiplicative Log Mean Divisia Index decomposition method for a set of countries (Portugal, UK, Brazil and China) with different socio-economic background and energy mix. The results show that overall energy efficiency trends display different patterns between countries and the same happens within each country from a sectoral perspective. Major drivers of improvements of overall energy efficiency were the intensity effect and the affluence effect, whereas the driver that hampered those improvements was the energy consumption per capita. Some policy implications derived from the results achieved are: policy decision-makers should support measures that promote the adoption of energy-saving technologies resulting from new technological developments; policy measures should be directed to raise awareness of end-users regarding energy efficiency and energy conservation efforts; policy measures promoting economic growth through the development (or expansion) of sectors of activity that consume less energy can also be implemented; finally, policy instruments may also be used to reduce the costs of implementing energy efficiency and energy-saving measures to households and firms.

The Energy Paradox and the Adoption of Energy-Saving Technologies in the Trucking Industry

Several federal benefit-cost analyses report an energy paradox among firms in competitive markets and conclude that firms would benefit from mandates to increase the use of energy-saving technologies. Such findings appear incompatible with neoclassical views that private firms in competitive markets minimize costs. The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, presumes that owners of trailers pulled by tractors belonging to others underinvest in energy-saving technologies because trailer owners incur the costs while tractor owners get the benefits. We test this hypothesis by collecting data and modeling the use of energy-saving technologies as a function of fleet size, the intensity of truck usage, and proxies for management quality. We find effects consistent with conventional models but no evidence that different ownership of tractors and trailers is associated with reduced use of energy-saving technologies on trailers. Regulators should refrain from making claims that firms underuse energy-saving technologies without first rigorously evaluating evidence for such claims.

Asymmetric substitutability between energy and capital: Evidence from the manufacturing sectors in 10 OECD countries

This paper investigates the substitutability between energy and capital in the manufacturing sectors of ten OECD countries since 1980 by applying a cost function approach that has been widely used to analyze industrial energy demand. First, we attempt to determine the source of the disagreement in the literature on the substitutability between energy and capital and reach a conclusion regarding the substitutability between energy and capital. Dividing energy and capital into sub-inputs, we analyze their substitutability. The empirical results indicate that fuel tends to complement capital in most countries, whereas electricity and capital are substitutes. Thus, this study confirms that heterogeneity in energy sources is a primary component of the systematic variation in the substitutability between energy and capital. Second, we examine asymmetric substitutability between energy and capital by estimating the Morishima elasticity of substitution. The estimates of the Morishima elasticity of substitution demonstrate that the substitution of energy for capital has dominated the substitution of capital for energy. This asymmetric substitutability is natural from the producer perspective because capital costs are much greater than energy costs in most countries. These results imply that the adoption of energy-saving technologies has not been induced in response to increased energy prices.

Characterizing perceptions of energy consumption

The adoption of energy-saving technologies is presumably deterred by underestimates of energy use and by corresponding underestimates of the difference between more- and less-efficient appliances. Thus, it is easy to grasp the potential policy significance of a recent study (1) concluding that Americans underestimate energy use by a factor of 2.8.

Energy Prices and the Adoption of Energy-Saving Technology*

This article investigates the link between factor prices, technology and factor demands. Using plant-level data from the Census of Manufactures, I compare the energy intensity of entrants and incumbents from 1967–97. A 10% increase in the price of energy reduces the relative energy intensity of entrants by 1%. The estimate implies that technology adoption by incumbents explains a statistically significant but relatively small fraction of changes in aggregate energy demand in the 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, entrants’ technology adoption can reduce the long run effect of energy prices on growth, but by less than previous research has found.

Microinductor for flip-chip micropower source

The rapid reduction of line width of large-scale integration (LSI) processes to a width of under 100 nm and the lowering of voltage to below 1 V to drive LSI, in addition to the sharp market growth of personal IT devices using lithium batteries, have seriously raised energy consumption around the world, necessitating the adoption of energy-saving technology using distributed small dc-dc convertors. In light of these demands, using new power microelectromechanical system technology and continuous deposition technology, we have developed a new microinductor with a thickness of 300 /spl mu/m. The magnetic core, consisting of CoFeSiB-Ti-SiO/sub 2/ multilayer film on a polyimide sheet, is applicable to a microinductor using a helical coil. In comparison with a mono-layer core such as a ferrite core, due to the magnetic shielding effect of each magnetic layers, a composite multilayer magnetic core is very effective in maintaining inductance up to a high dc current over 1 A. This paper proposes the use of microinductors characterized by high quality, superior dc-biased properties and low height as flip-chip sized micropower sources.

Factor Prices and Technical Change in Agricultural Development: The United States and Japan, 1880-1960

The purpose of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that a common basis for rapid growth in agricultural output and productivity lies in a remarkable adaptation of agricultural technology to the sharply contrasting factor proportions in the two countries. It is hypothesized that an important aspect of this adaptation was the ability to generate a continuous sequence of induced innovations in agricultural technology biased towards saving the limiting factors. In Japan these innovations were primarily biological and chemical. In the United States they were primarily mechanical.