Leveraging inter-firm influence in the diffusion of energy efficiency technologies: An agent-based model
[1];
[2];
[3];
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- Beijing Inst. of Technology (China); Beijing Inst. of Technology (China). Sustainable Development Research Inst. for Economy and Society of Beijing; Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Lemont, IL (United States)
- Beijing Inst. of Technology (China); Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Lemont, IL (United States)
- Beijing Inst. of Technology (China); Beijing Inst. of Technology (China). Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research
- Beijing Inst. of Technology (China); Beijing Inst. of Technology (China). Sustainable Development Research Inst. for Economy and Society of Beijing
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Lemont, IL (United States); Northeast Electric Power Univ., Jilin (China)
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Lemont, IL (United States)
Energy efficiency technologies (EETs) are crucial for saving energy and reducing carbon dioxide emissions. However, the diffusion of EETs in small and medium-sized enterprises is rather slow. Literature shows the interactions between innovation adopters and potential adopters have significant impacts on innovation diffusion. Enterprises lack the motivation to share information, and EETs usually lack observability, which suppress the inter-firm influence. Thus, an information platform, together with proper policies encouraging or forcing enterprises to disclose EET-related information, should help harness inter-firm influence to accelerate EETs' diffusion. To explore whether and how such an information platform affects EETs' diffusion in small and medium-sized enterprises, this report builds an agent-based model to mimic EET diffusion processes. Based on a series of controlled numerical experiments, some counter-intuitive phenomena are discovered and explained. The results show that the information platform is a double-edged sword that notably accelerates EETs' diffusion by approximately 47% but may also boost negative information to diffuse even faster and delay massive adoption of EETs. Increasing network density and the intensity of inter-firm influence are effective to speed EET diffusion, but their impacts diminish drastically after reaching some critical values (0.05 and 0.15 respectively) and eventually harm the stability of the system. Ultimately, the findings implicate that EET suppliers should carefully launch their promising but immature products; policies that can reduce the perceived risk by enterprises and the effort to maintain an informative rather than judgmental information platform can prominently mitigate the negative side effects brought by high fluidity of information.
- Research Organization:
- Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE; National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC); China Scholarship Council
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-06CH11357; 71673023; [2017]3109
- OSTI ID:
- 1639030
- Journal Information:
- Applied Energy, Vol. 263; ISSN 0306-2619
- Publisher:
- ElsevierCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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