Industrial Consumers’ Smart Grid Adoption: Influential Factors and Participation Phases

Abstract

Abstract:The participation of industrial consumers in smart grid transition is important due to their consumption footprint, heavy energy use and complexity in the implementation of smart energy technologies. Active involvement of industrial consumers in the development of smart grid solutions is important to ensure the energy system transformation. Despite the importance of industrial consumers has been identified, the empirical studies on the smart grid still mainly address residential and commercial consumers. Therefore, based on four case studies with two industrial consumers, one energy consulting company and one electricity retailer, this paper investigates the factors that influence industrial consumers' acceptance of smart grid solutions, and how the influential factors are relevant to the smart grid adoption phases. Eleven influential factors are identified that impact on four stages for industrial consumers' adoption of smart grid solutions (inscription, translation, framing, and stabilization stages). The eleven influential factors are: awareness of multiple contexts, shared support, return-of-investment, ease of use, flexibility and dynamic pricing, liberalization and energy tariff structure, customer focus, solution integration, process improvement, service quality, and company's green image.

Prosumer Communities and Relationships in Smart Grids: A Literature Review, Evolution and Future Directions

“…The energy value network enables consumers to transform into active prosumers and build strong relationships with other entities in the network [36]. The existing literature presents several methods that drive customer acceptance and engagement [36,73,[75][76][77][78][79]82]. Enablers of customer participation include-added comfort, energy independence, extended chance for electricity market participation, innovative control of appliances and devices, environmental benefits, economic incentives, energy bill reduction, clear and periodic billing, detailed information of energy consumption, enhanced energy supply reliability, and other social engagement factors [73].…”

“…Despite the importance of the active engagement of industrial consumers for energy system transformation, the majority of empirical studies focus on residential and commercial consumers [77]. In one study, two Danish industrial consumers, one energy retailer, and one energy consulting firm were investigated to determine various factors influencing industrial consumers' participation [77]. Results show eleven influential factors which impact four phases of smart grid adoption namely inscription, translation, framing and stabilization.…”

“…Finally, the stabilization stage involves adaptation and product redefinition which may also include ICT organizational change. The eleven influential factors include "awareness of multiple contexts, shared support, return-on-investment, ease of use, flexibility and dynamic pricing, liberalization and energy tariff structure, customer focus, solution integration, process improvement, service quality, and company's green image [77]. "…”

“…The factors influencing industrial consumers' smart grid participation were derived based on a qualitative approach using data from four Danish companies [77]. Denmark is an emerging nation in the field of the future intelligent grid, and the research findings apply to Danish smart grid context.…”

“…Provider-consumer relationships [16,36,[60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72] Consumer engagement [5,14,36,56,[73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82] Socio-Economic-technological aspect [18,28,46,74,76,80,81, This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 discusses the latest progress in the area of prosumer based smart grids focusing on prosumer communities and prosumer relationships. Section 3 outlines the future work and Section 4 concludes the paper.…”