Smart grids and households: how are household consumers represented in experimental projects?

ABSTRACT

This study contributes a comparative analysis of 11 Danish smart grid experimental projects with household involvement. The analysis describes the scripts for the future smart grid interaction investigated in the examined projects, the approaches to user representation, and the project findings concerning consumers and smart grids. Three main dimensions of the scripts are identified and discussed: economic incentives, automation, and information/visualisation. The methods employed for the development of user representations are primarily technical and techno-economic. While our analysis confirms previous findings that economic rationales and automation are central elements of smart grid scripts, the analysis also shows that there is considerable variation in the details of the scripts investigated. Our findings suggest that it may be useful for future smart grid projects to be more systematic and explicit in the analysis of household user perspectives and may consider a broader set of methods in this regard.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart grid
• experimental projects
• users
• scripts

Acknowledgements

The study is carried out in the context of iPower, a Strategic Platform for Innovation and Research in Intelligent Power. The authors thank the two anonymous reviewers for providing highly valuable and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Meiken Hansen is a Post-Doctoral researcher at DTU Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark. Her work focuses on household consumers in the smart grid area and stakeholder involvement in scenario processes in the Danish transport and energy sector.

Mads Borup is senior researcher at the Technology and Innovation Management division at the Technical University of Denmark, Department of Management Engineering. He has 15 years of experience with analyses of energy technology development and energy sector change towards sustainability.

Notes

1 An ‘aggregator’ monitors and aggregates the consumption of several consumers and based on this manages the interplay between consumption and electricity systems.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ipower project with funding from the Innovation fund Denmark [IFD 0603-00435B] and Danish Council Technology and Innovation [10-095378].