Technocracy versus reality: Perceptions in solar policy

The task of identifying Federal solar policy and research priorities has been delegated consulting firms, university researchers and technical laboratories. Solar commercialization policies for the residential sector have been a major focus of these entities' efforts; yet their research methodologies have generally ignored the advice and experience of homeowners who have installed solar domestic water and space heating systems. The absence of such input raises the question of how accurately the research community has evaluated the impact of specific barriers and incentive policies to residential solar use. Three surveys compared the planning community's assessments of the barriers and incentives to those of homeowners who had personally experienced the entire solar purchase, installation and operation sequence. Despite the potential for error, no major dichotomy was found to exist between the planning community's perceptions and those barriers and incentives actually extant.