A Root Cause Analyses of Low Consumer Confidence in Distributed Wind Energy

Abstract

The wind industry is a rapidly expanding energy source in the United States. However, urban, or distributed wind energy, which is classified as the utilization of energy at the point of its production, has remained limited in its installation. Since 2012, the installation of distributed wind turbines is generally declining. This paper attempts to gather the factors that are contributing to the declining trend and risks involved in the low installation trend of built-environment wind turbines using data available from existing projects. Initially, four main factors, namely, economic, technical, policies and incentives, social and environmental, and twelve secondary causes were identified based on their contribution level and the failure rate of existing small wind projects. The data available from existing projects were utilized and a questionnaire was designed and disseminated among industry and academic experts to rate each causative factor on a 0-10 scale. A project management approach was adopted to calculate the weight of each risk and prioritize the risks involved. To further investigate the causes, the systematic Root Cause Analysis (RCA) method was applied to investigate the primary and secondary causes. A risk factor for each dimension of causes was calculated using its probability of occurrence and potential impact on the project. The risk factor of all secondary causes is added to generate a hierarchy of primary causes (HPC). The prioritized risk of primary causes indicates that economic causes (40%) carry the highest rank followed by technical causes (34%), lack of policies and incentives (20%), and social and environmental causes (6%). The present study is limited to analyses of causative factors of limited urban turbine installation. The recommended practices to address the identified risks are beyond the scope of this paper and will be addressed in future endeavors.