D8.3.3 Social Sustainability: Industrial acceptance of ASTEP System

This document presents Deliverable 8.3.3, which assesses the current and future industrial acceptance of the ASTEP system. The report begins with a review of existing literature on industrial acceptance of Solar Thermal Energy (STE) systems, identifying acceptance categories for STE’s technical performance, financial viability, and alignment with environmental and energy management standards. Based on these findings, four acceptance categories were defined for the ASTEP study: Current Energy Use, Acceptance of ASTEP’s Technical Compatibility (TC), Acceptance of ASTEP’s Costs (AC), and Acceptance of ASTEP’s Impact on Standards (IS).Surveys were distributed to 318 industrial representatives across 15 countries worldwide, which assessed their opinion of the ASTEP system across the four categories on a 1 to 5 scale supplemented with comments from the industry. To generate future predictions of industrial acceptance, a dynamic regression model was developed to simulate the influence of investments per annum on industrial acceptance over a 10-year timeframe.The surveys revealed strong current industrial acceptance across all four categories, particularly amongst larger companies and industries with compatible thermal processes, a trend verified by similar case studies on STE’s industrial acceptance. On the other hand, smaller companies demonstrated lower industrial acceptance in the AC category due to high upfront costs of installing ASTEP. Future scenarios generated by regression modelling revealed that the annual investments into increasing ASTEP’s operating temperature and reducing upfront costs through subsidies enhanced industrial acceptance, particularly for smaller companies over the decade, trends that were further substantiated by findings in the literature. The model's predictive coefficients were validated using statistical fit indices, confirming its suitability for projecting acceptance trends.