Analysis of barriers affecting the adoption of community solar from consumer's perspective: A hybrid ISM-DEMATEL approach

Community solar has the capability to broaden solar accessibility and convalesce financial feasibility in comparison to conventional and commercial solar options and holds the potential to be part of the energy mix. Community solar avails ingress and affordability to solar power for those who may not be able to exploit it either due to financial or location constraints. Parallelly, it solves the issues related to electrification, fossil fuel crisis and greenhouse gas emission, contributes to sustainable development goals (SDG 7 and SDG 11), and realization of net-zero goals, however, the presence of barriers makes the adoption or scaling of community solar difficult. This research work intends to identify twelve crucial barriers for the adoption of community solar on the basis of the literature review and the perception of experts in the energy system. In this paper, we adopted hybrid Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) - Decision Ma king Trail and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) approach for comprehension of the causal and hierarchical relationships among barriers for community solar adoption. The result suggested that lack of consumer awareness, lack of regulations and policies addressing community solar and lack of business model are the most influential barriers as depicted in ISM-DEMATEL based methodology. With the presented novel method, policy-makers, utilities and communities can liaise, coordinate and practice the system-wide advantages of community energy projects. It can also aid the public sector in comprehending the barriers and requirements of people.