The world is faced with various societal challenges related to e.g. climate change and energy scarcity. To address these issues, complex innovative systems may be developed such as smart grids. When these systems are realized challenges pertaining to renewable energy and sustainability may, in part, be solved. To implement them, generally accepted common standards should be developed and used by firms and society so that the technological components can be connected and quality and safety requirements of smart grids and their governance can be guaranteed. This paper studies a subcomponent of the smart grid. Specifically, the paper studies competing technologies for a standard means of interface between the smart meter and the concentration point for collecting meter data. Three types of communication technologies for the interface are currently battling for standard dominance: Power line communication, Mobile telephony, and Radio frequency. Nine relevant standard dominance factors were found: operational supremacy, technological superiority, compatibility, flexibility, pricing strategy, timing of entry, current installed base, regulator, and suppliers. The Best-Worst Method was applied to calculate the factors' relative weights. The results show that experts believe that Power line communication has a high chance of becoming dominant and that the most important factor affecting standard success is technological superiority. The relative weights per factor are explained and theoretical and practical contributions, limitations, and areas for further research are discussed.
This article focuses on the battle for dominance between various battery technologies in the residential grid storage market (< 10 KWh) in the context of residential energy systems and the related home energy management systems. We focus on five major battery technologies that are available in the market (lithium-based batteries, lead-based batteries, flow batteries, nickel-based batteries, and sodium-based batteries). Based on a literature review and expert interviews, we study the factors for technology success in the residential grid storage market. By applying the best worst method (BWM), we assign the relative importance to the factors and predict which technology will have the highest chance of achieving success. We compare this to the technology that now has the highest market share and conclude that BWM is a useful method to indicate technology dominance in this market.
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