Analyzing the decision making process of property owners in the built environment under different renewable energy policies

Climate change and fossil fuel depletion are the main triggers for the cur-rent transition in the urban energy system. The high cost of capturing and transforming renewable energy (RE) resources into usable and clean energy is the main barrier for promotion of these resources. As a result, appropriate policy measures and tools for removal of market barriers are inevitable. In a descriptive study, this paper elaborates the decision making process of property owners at the micro level for adoption of RE technologies as a reaction to the energy policies. Initially, since to date there is no concrete framework for describing how policies flow in urban areas, the Policy Flow Cycle (PFC) as a general framework of the study is developed. An inventory of the most important existing RE policies as the main triggers of the PFC and a general categorization of them to establish a framework to describe their mechanisms and key features are provided. Property owners and their characteristics as a core of the PFC and decision making process are described in detail. The decision making process of property owners is presented for adoption of energy technologies based on the two reasoning approaches: pure-rational and non-rational.