Modeling Innovation Diffusion for Renewable Energy Technologies in City Neighborhoods

We present a model of innovation diffusion for Renewable Energy Technologies (RET) in Qatar city neighborhoods based on the spread of information in social and city-neighborhood networks. First, we evaluate the ability of the Barabasi Albert [13] model in diverse configurations to match the characteristics of a reference RET innovation diffusion network extracted from Twitter. Next, we create a network of city buildings in neighborhoods that include geo-located users in the Twitter network using constraints derived from Qatar's census geography. Finally, the information diffusion patterns in the household and Twitter networks are combined to model the rate of diffusion of renewable energy innovation, using an adapted linear threshold approach to information spread. The resulting approach provides a methodology for capturing how RET innovation diffusion from online social networks and city neighborhood networks may jointly influence the residential adoption of renewable energy technologies.