We are engaging with the owners of rooftop photovoltaic installations (PVs) to learn more about their usage and needs, in order to support broader adoption of this technology and to guide better, more sustainable energy provision. 

Since 1982, over 200,000 PV systems have been set up in Switzerland. While professionally maintained PV systems provide detailed performance data over decades, little is known about the many installations operating without professional monitoring. Our two-sided citizen science study Swiss Solar Stories is designed to fill in this gap (gathering detailed insights from long-term PV owners regarding maintenance, operational monitoring, and associated costs) as well as to understand the psychological or marketing barriers to investing in solar energy.  

In this way, anyone with rooftop solar cells can become citizen scientists, sharing data and comparing experiences with their peers – and with our researchers, who will be able to identify anomalies or outliers that signal the need for deeper analysis.  

We developed a chatbot powered by a large language model (LLM) to conduct dynamic and interactive interviews at scale. Our chatbot allows users to ask questions about solar energy and quickly provides well-founded information. Through adaptive, bias-mitigating conversations, it offers us a deeper understanding of human behaviour and decision making in the energy transition. 

Further details and initial findings can be viewed in our presentation (see the slide deck here). The study is financed by Citizen Science Zurich, a joint initiative of ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich, and is supported by the Mercator Foundation Switzerland. The project webpage is accessible here (German only). 

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