Changing Attitudes

One question that I have been thinking throughout my research is “will businesses switch towards renewable resources soon and if so, how?” This article provides me with a lot of research materials to help answer this question.

A study was conducted in Greece to show the main determinants of renewable energy investments throughout the country.

During the last decade, there has been an extreme lack of knowledge on renewable resources throughout the business world. This is due to businesses neglecting to conduct any form of research on these renewable energy sources because they believe it is too costly. Many of these potential investors believed that the maintenance of these new renewable resources is what made it so expensive. This was because they didn’t know the long term benefits renewable energy resources can have. In fact, they are actually more profitable in the long run.

“In Greece, they see 250 days and almost 5,000 hours of sunlight per year and have very strong winds throughout the year.”(Polemis 2020). But for some reason, Greece is very behind in the use of renewable energy sources compared to other European countries.

Why is this?

The study conducted included a questionnaire to large and small Greek businesses asking if they would consider switching to renewable energy resources.

The results found that investors with higher knowledge and a positive attitude towards the relationship between artificial intelligence and renewable energy resources were more likely to invest large amounts of money into the renewable energy resource industry.

They also found that many of the less educated companies did not want to switch to renewable energy resources because they do not believe they were reliable. One issue the investors pointed out was the variability of the weather. Why would these businesses invest their money when there is a high-risk present such as the inconsistency of weather? Why should they switch away from reliable energy sources such as fossil fuel? Renewable energy sources such as solar panels and wind turbines are weather dependent. The question of “what if the weather changes and these energy resources do not provide us with energy” was raised. In response, we refer back to the data on Greece's weather, where we see that Greece has some of the most well-suited weather necessary to fuel these renewable energy sources.

In the future, I believe we will see more businesses and investors switch to renewable energy sources. This will happen when these people become more educated on renewable energy sources and understand that it is cost-efficient.

Polemis, M & Spais, A (2020). Disentangling the drivers of renewable energy investments: The role of behavioral factors. Business Strategy and the Environment, 29 (6), 2170–2180