Car as Power Plant: Assessing Vehicle Technology Acceptance and its implications for the Business Model design.

Vehicle to Grid (V2G) has been proposed as an alternative way to cope with the electricity demands of the future by integrating the electric and transportation system infrastructures. In this way, the vehicle fleet will be used as a mobile storage system, enabling a higher penetration level for renewable energy sources. As an example, with the current personal transportation fleet of Europe, 2,390 GW of electric capacity could be fed into the grid. Currently, V2G is in the Research and Development stage and several institutions around the world are testing its capabilities in pilot projects. The Car as Power Plant (CaPP) concept emerged as one of the projects from The Green Village, which is an initiative of Delft University of Technology. Similar to the V2G technology, the Car as Power Plant's main aim is to deliver electricity to the grid. However, there are significant differences among them. In the case of the CaPP it uses Fuel Cell Vehicles to generate not only electricity but also water and heat. Therefore, the CaPP concept can be considered as a small multi-product power plant. There are additional elements that make the CaPP concept not only a way to deliver electricity to the grid, but a whole paradigm shift by using our cars to replace the electric system. The focus of this report is precisely in this technological concept. In the past, the studies about the CaPP concept have concentrated mainly on the technical feasibility and economic estimations of the project. One of the studies examined the technological gaps and opportunities for the CaPP, while the other assessed the ancillary services delivered to the grid by the Fuel Cell vehicles. Nevertheless, the technology evolves and emerges into society as a technological system due to the alignment of several socio-technical factors. Some of these include user practices, market conditions, consumer perceptions or a merely functional basis. For this reason, it is relevant to go one step further and not only understand the technical conditions of the system, but also the perceived benefits and concerns by the potential users. On this way it would be possible to incorporate into the Research and Development stage some elements that could be of interest for society, to ease the adoption of the technology in the future. The objective of this study is to bridge the gap between the technology development and the society's perception by assessing the vehicle technology acceptance and its implications for the business model design in the Netherlands. A model extended from the Car Technology Acceptance Model is proposed to conduct the study. This model is formed by eight independent, three moderating and one dependant variables. To have a better impression about the user's context, mixed research methods are employed. The application is done by individual in-depth structured interviews as the preferred data collection method with a reduced amount of participants. The sample comprises 20 participants, classified in 3 groups: 1) Students that do not own a car, 2) Professionals who own an internal combustion based car, and 3) Persons who own and electric based cars. From the total participants, 7 are students, 8 are gasoline car owners, and 5 are electric car drivers. Considering two different measurements instruments are used, the data analysis follows the same structure. The quantitative instrument uses descriptive statistics and then a correlation analysis using the SPSS software. The qualitative data is analysed using content analysis by grouping information together into category clusters and then comparing it with the group of participants. The results show the technology acceptance levels about the CaPP concept are in general above average, this is true in both the quantitative and qualitative sections. The most relevant factors to foster the technology adoption are grouped in 6 categories: price, incentives, information access, infrastructure, technology and values. The perceived benefits are classified in two categories: for the user and for society. The benefits for the user include: monetary incentives, guilt reduction, and increase in consumer power. The benefits for society are: environmental benefits, integration of services, and reducing the variation from renewable sources. The concerns are classified in two: car technology and the system. The concerns identified about car technology are: dangers of using hydrogen, degradation of the Fuel Cell, and lack of flexibility when the car is plugged-in. On the system side the concerns are: the lack of infrastructure, long distances from CaPP facilities to the final destination, and the risks involved in decentralizing the power generation. The semi-lease is determined to be the best business model structure to adopt the CaPP as it transfers the associated risks from the users to the provider and keeps the customer as the proprietary of the vehicle. Some of the policy recommendations to develop the niche include: continue funding the Fuel Cells R&D related activities, define an annual amount of energy that should be delivered to the grid with the CaPP technology, incentivize an open innovation scheme where different industry, governmental and academia actors come together under a joint venture to develop the technology, unify the development of the communication standards being used in the V2G projects around the world as they may influence the ones to be adopted in the future for the CaPP.Management of TechnologyTechnology, Strategy and EntrepreneurshipTechnology, Policy and Managemen