Abstract

Research has shown that feedback on energy use can aid households to reduce it significantly. In this context, smart metering technologies, and more specifically technology components interacting with data gathered and provided by a smart meter, allowing to provide the consumer with personalized feedback, consumption visualization, automated control,… could play an important role. After all, by means of this technology, households can be made more aware of their energy use and encouraged to reduce it. This paper applies a user centered approach towards the estimation of the adoption potential for smart metering technologies in Flanders, Belgium. We conducted a representative quantitative survey with 1314 respondents living in Flanders. A segmentation on ownership of, attitude towards and adoption intention of smart metering devices was performed on the data. Traditional approaches of intention surveying often result in an overestimation of the innovation adoption potential. To overcome this problem, the Product Specific Adoption Potential scale (or PSAP-scale) was used and 6 segments were found. These segments were labeled “Current Owners”, “Innovators”, “Early Adopters”, “Early Majority”, “Later Adopters” and “Out of Potentials. The verification of the adoption potential of smart metering devices for different pricing scenarios revealed a rather high price sensitivity.

Highlights

  • Most residential energy users are not aware of their usage pattern

  • The respondents were asked to specify an “acceptable price limit” they are willing to pay for a smart metering device that is capable of providing the 10 use cases that we provided in the previous question

  • The respondents had to indicate which price they are willing to pay for a smart metering device, without any control mechanisms or checks whether the indicated price is a feasible price for the supply side

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Summary

Introduction

Most residential energy users are not aware of their usage pattern. The amount paid every month is the only indicator of energy use for the majority of the households. Households have little or no knowledge on the amount of energy that their appliances consume, or its share in the total household energy use. Mansouri-Azar et al [1] proved that a majority of their respondents did not know which of their electric appliances consumed most energy. At the time the research was carried out, lighting, freezer and dishwasher were the most consuming appliances in the UK households. Most of the respondents mentioned the washing machine in their top three

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