Nowadays, the global energy system has accelerated the transition to being low-carbon. It has become an inevitable requirement to build a green-cycle and low-carbon energy system for social development, while the solar and other renewable energies have showed huge potential and great prospect. Since 2014, the Chinese government has been implementing the construction of Photovoltaic Poverty Alleviation Projects (PPAPs) which is in conformity to the concept of green development, making great efforts to accelerate the speed of rural poverty alleviation [27]. From 2015 to 2017, National Energy Administration has issued the special construction scales of PPAPs for 1.5 million kilowatts, 5.16 million kilowatts and 4.19 million kilowatts respectively for three consecutive years. As of 2019, the National Energy Administration has issued a total of 17.12 million kilowatts of PV poverty alleviation, which can help 2.88 million poverty-stricken households in China [66].
China’s PPAPs mainly include four types: household PV power station, village-level PV power station, greenhouse PV power station, and commercial PV power station for poverty alleviation. The beneficiaries in this research mainly benefit from three types, i.e., household, village-level, and commercial PV power stations for poverty alleviation.
However, as an innovative and targeted poverty reduction initiative, PPAPs must overcome current difficulties in order to achieve the expected results in a large scope. In previous researches, scholars mostly study the internalities obstacles (quality of PV equipment, profit allocation mechanism, institutional framework of energy policy management, etc.) and externalities obstacles (subsidy delays, environmental licensing challenges, etc.) to discuss the sustainable development of PPAPs [26, 37, 52]. With the rapid development of PPAPs, more and more rural residents who are the main stakeholders of PPAPs participate in PPAPs. Therefore, their satisfaction should not be ignored for solar PV adoption. The State Grid is a monopolistic power supply corporation in China, whose technicians also play a major role in the progress of PPAPs. They need to proactively offer tracking services and develop a particular plan according to each customer to ensure the safe and stable operation of PV equipment. In the case of solar projects in Ghana, the continued growth of the solar market has been hampered by financing difficulties and the lack of local technicians and credit lines [61]. Only individuals who trust the installer and believe the solar is beneficial are more likely to contact the installer and adopt it [67].
Therefore, it is essential to reveal how the beneficiaries’ satisfaction enhance their trust in State Grid for PPAPs. It might promote the adoption of solar PV and contribute to poverty alleviation. To this end, this study constructs an integrated model adding the features of PPAPs and uses the AMOS software to explore the factors affecting beneficiaries’ satisfaction. Also, it proposes relevant measures to promote the beneficiaries’ satisfaction with PPAPs, which may be useful for other developing countries’ poverty alleviation.
The rest of this paper is arranged as follows: the existing literature is reviewed and discussed in Sect. 2. Section 3 will explain the conceptual model and propose the research hypotheses. The methodology and the results will be introduced respectively in Sect. 4 and Sect. 5, followed by Sect. 6, with the details of impact of the results, theoretical contributions and limitations. Finally, in Sect. 7 it will conclude this paper with policy implications.
Satisfaction theory and method
With a rapid development of satisfactory theories, scholars have adopted different theories and methods to study the satisfaction of their respective fields. In terms of the adopted theories, grounded theory [5], three-factor theory of customer satisfaction [4] and satisfaction spillover theory [65] are widely applied to explore the satisfaction in various fields. The most common theory is the Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI). In 1989, CSI was originally established by Sweden [42], namely the Swedish Customer Satisfaction Barometer Index (SCSBI). Based on this, a new factor “perceived quality” was added into establish an American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) model [20]. At present, scholars also begin to adopt the extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2) to study customer satisfaction of mobile food ordering or mobile commerce [3]. In terms of the adopted methods, qualitative methods such as fuzzy analytic hierarchy process [69] and evaluation method based on rough set conditional information entropy [79] are adopted to establish the attribute weight of satisfaction. Furthermore, some scholars adopted quantitative method such as cross-domain hybrid method [36] and partial least squares method based on SEM technology [17, 51]to evaluate satisfaction.
Factors affecting satisfaction
SEM or path analysis is mostly used in satisfaction studies to explore the causal relationship among variables [11, 77]. In the field of renewable energy, the important factors determining consumers’ satisfaction included the image of service provider, consumer expectation, and perceived quality, etc. [51]. Specifically, in the solar PV research, the benefits of the solar household system (SHS) lifestyle and the quality of its equipment played a key role in improving users’ satisfaction with SHS in rural Bangladesh from a quantitative perspective [34, 46]. At the same time, public’s satisfaction played a positive role in using solar technology [33]. Information and educational campaigns about clean energy technologies might have a positive impact on home owners’ satisfaction, leading to positive word-of-mouth recommendation and other impact [46]. In a survey of distributed solar technology adoption in rural India, it was found that the use of home solar technology is closely related to the subjective satisfaction of home lighting [2]. In addition, scholars also analyzed other factors affecting satisfaction, such as public trust [29], purchase intention [23], and government image [10].
Satisfaction and trust
Trust is regarded as a critical feature and a central mechanism in business transactions [64]. In the expansion of modern coal-fired power plant projects and power grid projects, trust exerted a significant influence on public support attitudes [41, 48]. For the environmental sustainable development, companies need to invest resources to increase customers’ green perceived value, thereby enhancing green trust and customers’ green loyalty [12]. Previous literatures have shown there is a direct and indirect correlation between satisfaction and trust. For the former, some scholars found that the satisfaction of neighborhood facilities was an important predictor of social trust [39]. Otherwise, the trust in local government also had a significant positive impact on urban residents’ environmental public service satisfaction, while the trust in central government had no significant impact [70]. Thus, it was necessary to improve residents’ trust in local governments with communication and cooperation. For the latter, trust played a certain intermediary or mediation role when scholars discussed the relationship among satisfaction of service quality [8], organizational culture and leadership performance [44] and manufacturer-supplier [50]. Accordingly, some scholars also used satisfaction as an intermediary variable to discuss the influence between trust with green perceived quality, green perceived risk [13] and relationship benefits [19].
Overall, current researches mainly use ACSI model to explore the factors that affect the satisfaction. A few researches have begun to use UTAUT to explore it, but few studies integrate the two models to explore the impact of users’ satisfaction and their behaviors. Therefore, this study will consider integrating ACSI and UTAUT model adding “environmental perception” variable. In addition, most scholars investigated the relationships between satisfaction and loyalty or complaint; few scholars explored the relationship between satisfaction and trust. Even though some scholars have explored the relationship between satisfaction and trust, most of them discussed satisfaction and trust as an intermediary role. This study will add “trust in State Grid” as a behavioral outcome variable for beneficiaries’ satisfaction to explore the relationship between beneficiaries’ satisfaction and their trust in State Grid.
The conceptual model
Based on the ACSI model, this study builds beneficiaries’ satisfaction index of PPAPs. Among them, perceived value is a subjective feeling of customers on their benefits after integrating quality and price [68], while PPAPs generally involve State Grid, government, and enterprises’ behavior. Thus, the beneficiaries do not need to afford “high investment” The total incomes of the PPAPs are directly shared by the beneficiaries or together with the State Grid and village collectives. Therefore, we will not consider the influencing factors of perceived value in this paper. The complaint and loyalty respectively represented the degree of users’ dissatisfaction and lack of trust in the service provided by the product [31]. This study will combine these two consequence variables into one to explore the beneficiaries’ trust in State Grid, which includes both the beneficiaries’ judgment on the PPAPs’ services provided by the State Grid, and the beneficiaries’ credibility on it. At the same time, “social influence” and “environmental perception” will be added to the original model in order to further explore the factors influencing satisfaction of PPAPs. Figure 1 shows the proposed research framework of this study.
Social influence
Social influence means that the extent to which an individual perceives it significant, while others believe they should apply the new system [63]. Since solar PV is an emerging renewable energy, the beneficiaries are not fully familiar with it. Their satisfaction with PPAPs is primarily influenced by the views, ideas, and attitudes of others. Thus, this study defines social influence as the extent to which the beneficiaries perceive the government officials and village leaders who persuade them to adopt solar PV. The influence of government officials or village leaders is also an external environmental impact. It was found that there were indirect effects of environment and outcome expectation through constructing a theoretical framework of the factors influencing farmers’ participation in the joint-stock cooperative system from self-efficiency, outcome expectation, and external environment [74]. Therefore, this study proposes the following hypothetical path:
H1. Social influence will have a positive impact on the behavioral expectation with PPAPs.
In terms of perceived quality, social interaction was divided into “social interaction with employees” and “social interaction with peers”, simultaneously, they all had an impact on perceived service quality [16]. Government officials and village leaders should promote residents’ awareness to understand PPAPs or the program itself in their daily interactions. Therefore, this study proposes the following hypothetical path:
H2. Social influence will have a positive impact on the perceived quality with PPAPs.
Environmental perception is an element of judging the government’s environmental governance. The more serious the public perceive environmental pollution, the lower the local government’s evaluation will be. Consumers’ cognition and preference for ecological technology were affected by society. Thus, it would underestimate the potential of consumers’ choice for the emerging environmental technologies when neglecting the process of social influence [6]. Therefore, this study proposes the following hypothetical path:
H3. Social influence will have a negative impact on environmental perception with PPAPs.
It was confirmed that social influence affected citizen satisfaction through developing a model for compelling citizens to adopt e-government technology [9]. Customers could gain social acceptance from others when using a product, which would simultaneously increase social value and satisfaction [22]. Therefore, this study proposes the following hypothetical path:
H4. Social influence will have a negative impact on beneficiaries’ satisfaction with PPAPs.
Trust was an essential driving force for consumers’ shopping decisions in social commerce [40]. Consumers developed familiarity and trust in the products when engaging in social interactions [72]. Personal factors, community factors, and social factors all significantly affected residents’ social trust, which demonstrated that the improving of society trust not only need individual efforts but also need intermediary organizations’ progress [73]. Therefore, this study proposes the following hypothetical path:
H5. Social influence will have a positive impact on trust in State Grid with PPAPs.
Behavioral expectation
Expectation represents both prior consumption experience with its offering and a forecast of the company’s ability to provide quality in the future [20]. The government is involved to ensure the quality of designing and implementing PPAPs. Therefore, this study defines the behavior expectation as the degree to which the beneficiaries expected the government’s behavior with PPAPs. In the energy sector, it was found that consumer expectation has a positive relationship with perceived quality [51]. Otherwise, combined with the need to build a service-oriented government, public expectation was found to have a positive impact on perceived quality [71]. Therefore, this study proposes the following hypothetical path:
H6. Behavioral expectation will have a positive impact on perceived quality with PPAPs.
A lot of researches showed that user expectation and environmental perception have direct or indirect effects on users’ satisfaction and loyalty [75], but the relationship between them still has not been discussed. At present, PPAPs are still in a period of continuous development, and they still require subsidies and support from the government. Only when government attaches great importance can farmers better understand the significance. Therefore, this study proposes the following hypothetical path:
H7. Behavioral expectation will have a positive impact on environmental perception with PPAPs.
Public’s satisfaction could be jointly influenced by three variables: public expectation, perception of public service quality, and perceived difference in service effectiveness [38]. Otherwise, passengers expectation was positively correlated with passengers’ perceived quality and their satisfaction through the analysis of passengers’ satisfaction [59, 71]. Therefore, this study proposes the following hypothetical path:
H8. Behavioral expectations will have a positive impact on beneficiaries’ satisfaction with PPAPs.
At present, some scholars have explored the indirect effects between customer expectation and perceived trust of customer satisfaction based on ACSI model. Customer expectation (antecedent variable) and perceived trust (result variable) is used to explore the impact on satisfaction, accordingly, customer expectation also have an indirect effect on perceived trust through satisfaction. Some scholars found that effort expectation had a significant impact on perceived trust as an internal belief factor for the public to use E-government [78]. Therefore, this paper proposes the following hypothetical path:
H9. Behavior expectation will have a positive impact on trust in State Grid with PPAPs.
Perceived quality
Perceived quality is the service quality that customers perceived, while the concept of service quality is defined as a comparison between expectation and actual service performance [56]. In this paper, perceived quality is defined as the beneficiaries’ perceive quality changes in family energy use and environment problems after the adoption of PPAPs. Scholars found that there is often a positive relationship between perceived quality and consumers’ awareness in environmental protection [14]. Consumers will feel a high quality about the product if it has an environmental label on the package, which will also encourage them to pay attention to environmental awareness [18]. Therefore, this study proposes the following hypothetical path:
H10. Perceived quality will have a positive impact on environmental perception with PPAPs.
Some researchers simplified the perceived service quality into three dimensions, including platform perceived service quality, bicycle entity perceived quality, and value perceived quality. The platform and bicycle entity perceived service quality were found to significantly affect users’ satisfaction [77]. In addition, the equipment quality of solar home systems (SHS) played an essential role in improving users’ satisfaction in rural areas [34]. Therefore, this study proposes the following hypothetical path:
H11. Perceived quality will have a positive impact on beneficiaries’ satisfaction with PPAPs.
An indirect relationship between e-service quality and green trust was found to explore the factors influencing green purchase intention [1]. Other researchers found that perceived quality also had a direct and positive effect on trust. Green perceived quality positively affected green trust and the relationship between them was partially moderated by green satisfaction [12]. Therefore, this study proposes the following hypothetical path:
H12. Perceived quality will have a positive impact on trust in State Grid with PPAPs.
Environmental perception
Environmental perception can be divided into two aspects. One refers to the image formed by the environment in an individual’s mind. The other refers to the feeling that the quality of the environment brings to the individual [55]. The environmental perception in this paper refers to the beneficiaries’ perception of environmental quality due to excessive use of non-renewable energy. Environmental perception and farmers’ satisfaction with desertification control are also highly correlated [34]. Therefore, this study proposes the following hypothetical path:
H13. Environmental perception will have a positive impact on beneficiaries’ satisfaction with PPAPs.
It was found that the perception of environmental problems was an essential factor in low-carbon behavior [1], while social trust had a moderating effect between environmental fairness perception and farmers’ low carbon production behavior [49]. It was also found that the trust in government had a significant moderating effect on the relationship between public risk perception (public environmental risk perception, public health risk perception, public economic risk perception) and neighborhood conflict intentions [12]. Therefore, this study proposes the following hypothetical path:
H14. Environmental perception will have a positive impact on trust in State Grid with PPAPs.
Beneficiaries’ satisfaction
Satisfaction is an overall affective response to a perceived discrepancy between prior expectation and perceived performance after consumption [54]. This study defines satisfaction as the sense of happiness formed by the beneficiaries through the previous expectation and actual perception. Some scholars confirmed a close connection between trust and users’ satisfaction in mobile commerce [32, 58]. In addition, scholars found that consumers’ green satisfaction has a significant effect on green trust in the research on users’ word-of-mouth intentions of the green hotel industry [43]. Therefore, this study proposes the following hypothetical path:
H15. Beneficiaries’ satisfaction will have a positive impact on trust in State Grid with PPAPs.