Renewable energy awareness among future generation of Palestine

Highlights

• We developed a questionnaire to measure the awareness of youth of RE in Palestine.

• We analyzed the results using t-test, ANOVA, chi-square, Post hoc, Tukey HSD test.

• We found that students awareness and knowledge about RE are limited.

• 22.8% of the students think that Palestine is making a use of solar energy.

• 70.4% of students confirmed using solar energy for water heating.

Abstract

This study aims to measure the level of university students' knowledge regarding renewable energy including technical, economical and policy aspects. Thus, a questionnaire is developed and distributed to students from all faculties of An-Najah National University. The results show that there is no significant difference in students' knowledge of renewable energy considering gender, educational level of study, and parental education level. Meanwhile, faculty choice and high school specialization have a strong correlation with the level of knowledge as compared to other demographic variables. In specific, students who come from vocational schools are usually more aware of renewable energy than other university students. In addition to that, this study shows that 45.6% of the students thought that Palestine has high wind potential while more than 40% of the participants believe that Palestine has a very high potential of solar energy. However, only 22.8% of the students think that Palestine is making use of this potential as one of the renewable energy sources. In contrast, 71.3% of the respondents believe that the investment in RE projects is successful, and 70.4% of students confirmed using solar energy for water heating. As a result, students' awareness and knowledge about renewable energy are found limited.

Introduction

The failure of renewable energy implementation in any country is connected to low public awareness, policy failures, and market characterization. Thus, measuring the public awareness of renewable energy is important. As a matter of fact, the public may have many behavioral barriers for renewable energy. Behavioral barriers for renewable energy can be defined as negative decisions of the end-user. Better awareness of renewable energy leads to positive attitude toward this technology. Meanwhile, the lack of non-technical information about this technology causes some negative attitude of the end-user.

Based on that, researchers from different parts of the world discussed the importance of energy and renewable energy (RE) education level of awareness at all teaching levels starting from schools reaching up to universities. At school level, many researches explore students awareness towards RE [1,21], attitudes [4] and opinions [9]. Çelikler and Aksan [8] have developed a scale to assess attitudes towards RE for school students. In the meanwhile, Kacan [11] has discussed RE awareness in vocational-technical educational system. Zyadin et al. [10] has discussed secondary school teachers' knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes toward RE. Moreover Khambalkar et al. [24] has made an assessment of public awareness towards RE. On the other side, a lot of studies discuss the awareness level of university students [3,6] so as to find out the relation between demographics and level of knowledge [2,5]. Meanwhile, other researches discussed socioeconomic and demographic factors that influence the public awareness of RE sources [7]. Besides, Kardooni et al. [20] has investigated the factors that influence RE technology acceptance and attempted to show the impact of cost and knowledge on the perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of RE technology. Moreover, Yazdanpanah et al. [13] have examined factors influencing the intention of engineering students to use RE. R. Rezaei and M. Ghofranfarid [22] have tested a model for the intention of using RE sources at rural households in Iran. Similarly, Hosseini et al. [23] have presented a model for social acceptance of RE in developing countries.

Additional studies at the university level can be found for many countries. Cecily et al. [15] have determined students' awareness, attitude and expected benefit of photovoltaic systems. Similarly, Karabulut et al. [19] have conducted an investigation on RE education at the university level in Turkey. Hassan and Ismail [17] have discussed the infusion of environmental education in chemistry teaching and student awareness. Other studies also talked about the environmental awareness [18], RE awareness and opinions of university students [25], global warming awareness [16], public opinion on RE technologies and climate change [26]. In addition to that, there are some studies that give focus on teachers at universities and schools whereas Guven et al. [29] have discussed RE awareness of pre-service teachers. Meanwhile, Çelikler [12] determined the awareness of pre-service science teachers. Ocetkiewicz et al. [14] have examined how teachers of lower secondary schools comprehend education for sustainable development. Li et al. [27] discussed the role of local private participation in China's transition to domestically available RE technologies [27]. Another study reviewed the significant importance of the civil society stakeholders in promoting RE and provided an overview of the concepts that lead to the development of a conceptual model based on the theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) [28]. Keramitsoglou in Ref. [30] has focused on adolescents' knowledge, perceptions and attitudes towards RE Sources in order to detect their particular educational needs [30]. Moreover, in Ref. [31] the altitude of Qatar university students has been measured towards climate, renewable energy and energy efficiency which made an important baseline knowledge about student's attitude and awareness of RE. Preservice teachers who also can be university students have been considered for such a research in Ref. [33], whereas recommendations for curriculum development were given based on their awareness about the topic. On the hand, updated research on student awareness has been provided in Ref. [34], whereas the awareness was found to be different from other previous studies. This shows the importance of having different successive researches with this regard.

In view of the studies mentioned earlier, it is very important to measure the awareness of the youth either at schools or universities toward RE. This helps in spreading technology and assures the social acceptance which will support the development of this sector. However, in Palestine there is no enough information regarding student awareness of RE. Moreover, by looking at the refereed literature, there are no research articles that show any relevant activity with these regards. Thus, this research aims to measure students' awareness and attitude toward RE utilization, laws, investment, benefits, source of information. To do so, a questionnaire was developed and distributed to students at An-Najah National University in Palestine. After that, the obtained results were tested by using t-test, ANOVA test, chi-square, Post hoc comparisons, Tukey HSD test, descriptive statistics and frequencies. It is worth to mention that this is the first study in Palestine that tests university students' knowledge and attitudes towards RE. Moreover, the level of RE awareness among the university students who are in their first year maybe represents the level of knowledge that they have gained through their school education as well as the Palestinian society knowledge with this regards. The significance of this paper is that it is the first paper that includes information regarding student's awareness and knowledge of renewable energy in Palestine. Moreover, it makes baseline information for those who would like to investigate the awareness with this regards later. In addition, the information presented in this paper can be used for curriculum and off curriculum development, energy policy making and other promoting activities regarding renewable energy. After all, measuring the awareness level of Palestinian youth is very important in line with the future of energy generation in Palestine and the Palestinian energy policy. Currently, there is high dependency on energy exported from Israel in Palestine. In the meanwhile, there are a lot of plans to utilize RE as an alternative energy source. Therefore, there is a dire need to measure the awareness of RE of the youth in Palestine (18–23 years old) who will be the next leading generation with this regards.

This paper is consisted of four sections including an introduction that shows the importance of measuring students' awareness and knowledge based on former researches. In the second section the development of the questionnaire based on previous research is illustrated considering research questions, questionnaire size, measuring scale, and data analysis plan. Then sections three and four show the results of this study as well as the study conclusion respectively.