UNDERSTANDING PEOPLE'S ADOPTION OF INDIVIDUAL-USE RENEWABLE ENERGY TECHNOLOGY

This thesis attempts to understand why people adopt or reject individual-use renewable energy technologies (IURET). I used factors from Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovation Theory to understand how people's perceptions towards the characteristics of a given IURET (such as price, compatibility, complexity, etc.), the characteristics of the individual adopter (such as innovativeness and environmental awareness), and the communication network (inter-personal communications and mass media) can influence adoption. An online questionnaire was sent to 101randomly selected Michigan households (using random digit dialing) to ask people whether or not they had adopted at least one IURET and to assess the above-mentioned factors from Rogers' theory. Data analysis was then conducted in SPSS using Chi-squared and binary logistic regression to determine the relationship between adoption behaviors (the dependent variable) and the factors from Rogers' theory (the independent variables) while controlling for education. The results show that Rogers' factors of price and observability and the control variable of education were all significant in explaining adoption but the other factors of Rogers' theory were not. For example, if individuals perceive the price of IURET to be reasonable or if they observe their neighbors using these technologies, then they are more likely to adopt. These results indicate that, if we want to promote greater adoption of IURET, we should focus our efforts on making the price of IURET more affordable through incentives and other mechanisms. Adopters should also be given some form of reward if they provide free demonstrations of their IURET in use to their neighbors to take advantage of the observability effects.

Technology, mining methods and landscapes of a placer mining district in Fairbanks, Alaska, 1900-1930

Placer miners in Alaska’s interior were part of the last great gold rush in North America. As word of gold in the Fairbanks Mining District traveled down the Yukon River, a wave of miners from the Klondike placer fields in Dawson, along with a assortment of speculators and inexperienced green horns from the Lower 48 converged on the confluence of the Tanana and Chena rivers hoping to strike it rich. The steamers coming from Dawson were integral; they carried miners with experience working the frozen subarctic placer deposits of the Klondike. These miners encountered new environmental challenges that required the development of new technologies and mining methods to efficiently harvest gold. These methods and machines were brought into Fairbanks and further perfected to account for the local conditions. This thesis describes the local mining technologies and methods employed in the Fairbanks district and the landscape patterns created during the placer mining boom years of 1903-1909, decline years of 1910-1923 and recovery of 1923-1930.