Date of Award

Fall 12-1-2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Technology Management

Department

College of Technology

Abstract

In the last four or five decades, increased political and social pressure has been placed on commercial and residential consumers to reduce consumption of fossil fuels and invest in alternative methods of energy production for electricity, heating and cooling. Commercially, wind turbines and photovoltaic energy production equipment has sprung up all over the country. Other forms of energy production such as hydroelectric and geothermal energy production facilities have also been built. During this time however, very few residential ‘green energy’ investments have been made. Only in recent years have residential home owners begun to “wet their feet” on ‘green’ energy equipment. Cost has been the major factor. Of late though, costs have been coming down and efficiency has been going up making home owners begin to sense that alternative energy may now be entering the realm of economic feasibility. Unfortunately, home owners have had no reliable or credible tools to assess economic viability of such systems. The purpose of this research is to develop a tool to access the potential of alternative energy sources and test it statistically by surveying subjects in five different ‘green’ energy categories. Since atmospheric (air-to-air) heat pumps have been around for many years and represent a mature heating and cooling technology, upgrading older inefficient HVAC equipment to new high efficiency atmospheric heat pumps is the category used to baseline the experiment. Ground source heat pumps and direct solar heating systems were modeled and compared to the iv baseline. Wind energy and photovoltaic energy production systems were modeled, surveyed and compared to using only grid supplied electricity. Results show that in four of the five cases tested, the less mature ‘green’ energy equipment; photovoltaic solar, direct solar and ground source heat pump equipment are in general not economically viable without tax rebates to significantly lower the net investment. Setback rules and environmental and aesthetic ordinances against siting them in those counties severely restrict the population of wind energy devices so that an effective test of this category using the model could not be done. The model performed well with the baseline data. Performance of the model with ground source heat pumps was reasonable, but improvements in the model reflecting differing features of ground source heat pumps need to be made. Performance of the model with photovoltaic energy production equipment was also good. Extending the test population to all fifty states and extending the utility bill test range from one year to five years will provide much more useful data to test and improve the model. Although the model development and testing done in this work only represents a small contribution to the bridging of a large gap in consumer confidence in green energy products, it represents a big step into an area that very few have attempted to venture into.

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