Consumers as innovators in the electricity sector? Consumer perceptions on smart grid services

Abstract

This article assesses the possibilities of using consumer innovation in the electricity sector, which is slow-moving, yet faced with huge challenges and opportunities to become "smart" and "low carbon." We study the benefits of engaging innovative consumers ("lead users") in product, service, and business innovation in terms of (a) the capacity of lead user-consumers to innovate in the highly regulated electricity market, (b) the attractiveness of such lead-user generated ideas for mainstream consumers, (c) the usefulness of lead-user engagement for companies in the energy industry, and (d) the usefulness of lead user engagement for the necessary broader societal transition processes. We conclude that consumers can stimulate industry-wide innovation even in challenging contexts like "smart" and "low-carbon" solutions and the highly regulated energy industry. Lead user-consumers can also articulate societal and social responsibility concerns that are relevant for the entire market.

Who ‘Uses’ Smart Grids? The Evolving Nature of User Representations in Layered Infrastructures

“…To gain further feedback from this extended group of 'peers', selected respondents participated in the research project's one-day workshop, where we introduced our preliminary findings and elaborated them further in a roundtable discussion. We draw upon both the results of the consultation and the results from the workshop discussion, complemented by case examples from European countries, documented elsewhere [17,27,66,67,69,70].…”

“…Coming to very similar conclusions, a study of Danish smart grid experimentation projects discovered three main 'scripts' that inform the interaction that these projects expect between household consumers and future smart grids: an economic incentives script, an automation script, and an information and visualization script [64]. At the same time, many social science scholars of smart grids and smart meters have reacted to these types of preconfiguration of the user and their models of rationality by highlighting the diverse and often unpredictable ways in which consumers engage with smart energy, most typically in their homes [22,27,[65][66][67] but also partially as part of wider settings such as residential areas [26].…”

“…By studying these uses and users, we also produce a more subtle understanding of how exactly smart energy technologies might contribute to sustainability in energy systems. To these aims, we draw upon and advance a considerable body of STS research on user-technology relationships [18,19] and the technological, social, and policy assumptions and implications of smart grids and meters [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. The article addresses two overarching research questions:…”

Editing out unsustainability from consumption: From information provision to nudging and social practice theory

“…Consumers have been excluded from active participation for decades and competition is a fairly recent phenomenon. The product itself is difficult to understand and billing practices have only recently begun to reflect underlying consumption patterns through quarter-yearly real-time billing rather than billing based on estimates with an annual settling of actual consumption (Burke and Stephens, 2017;Heiskanen and Matschoss, 2016).…”

“…However, current efforts to provide more information (for example, via smart meters) and enable active energy citizenship are positive in the sense that they enable consumers to gain agency -for example, by joining energy cooperatives (European Commission, 2015). The concern is that only a small group of pioneering consumers are enthusiastic enough about energy for such active engagement, whereas most consumers are not particularly interested in their energy consumption on a daily basis due to other pressing concerns (Heiskanen and Matschoss, 2016).…”