Diffusion of photovoltaic in Germany: roles of policy, system suppliers and adopters

In some countries photovoltaic (PV) technology is at a stage of development at which it can compete with conventional electricity sources. A case in point is Germany where PV market has reached a mature stage. As a manifest of this, the German government has recently reduced the feed-in-tariff, which had been the strongest driver of PV diffusion. This development raises a fundamental question: Why would potential adopters be motivated to adopt PV when feed-in tariff diminishes? The point of departure for the literature on diffusion of PV has been on the effect of subsidies but little attention has paid to adopter motives when the policy support is scaled down. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the adopter motives for photovoltaic applications. Anchored in an extensive exploratory case study we provide an encompassing explanation of roles of policy, adopters and system suppliers on diffusion of PV.

Development of a genre-dependent TTS system with cross-speaker speaking-style transplantation

One of the biggest challenges in speech synthesis is the production of contextually-appropriate naturally sounding synthetic voices. This means that a Text-To-Speech system must be able to analyze a text beyond the sentence limits in order to select, or even modulate, the speaking style according to a broader context. Our current architecture is based on a two-step approach: text genre identification and speaking style synthesis according to the detected discourse genre. For the final implementation, a set of four genres and their corresponding speaking styles were considered: broadcast news, live sport commentaries, interviews and political speeches. In the final TTS evaluation, the four speaking styles were transplanted to the neutral voices of other speakers not included in the training database. When the transplanted styles were compared to the neutral voices, transplantation was significantly preferred and the similarity to the target speaker was as high as 78%.