Social acceptance of smart meters

Abstract

The introduction of intelligent meters - smart meters - to the electricity infrastructure should provide the grid intelligence the ability to cope with challenges and changes; thus, it is named smart grid (Verbong et al., 2013). We have learned that the smart grid system is a complex product system because its technologies, components and interfaces are interdependent; hence, the smart meter as its key node is a complex product (Ligtvoet et al., 2015; Suarez, 2004). However, the societal rejection of smart meters detains the introduction of smart meters in the Netherlands. Societal rejection results from a lack of consideration of social ethical values and conflicting values in society (Künneke et al., 2015). The research objective is to determine the most important values for the social acceptance of smart meters and formulate design requirements that facilitate its social acceptance in the Netherlands. We have reviewed social acceptance literature, finding multiple studies (Künneke, Mehos, Hillerbrand, & Hemmes, 2015; Ligtvoet et al., 2015; Narayanan & Chen, 2012; Shin, Kim, & Hwang, 2015) stating that a complex technology such as the smart meter should be assessed from multiple perspectives. We build our concept on the social acceptance concept of Wüstenhagen et al. (2007), adapting the dimensions to socio-political, market and household acceptance, which represent the important stakeholder groups for smart meters. Literature regarding each group of stakeholders’ acceptance was analyzed to derive and define their values, namely energy policy, network economics, technology management, technology acceptance, applied ethics and ethics of technology literature stream (see Appendix 1). Our multidisciplinary approach to analyze the acceptance and selection of a complex technology is a first notion and our theoretical contribution. This framework for the social acceptance of smart meters enables utilizing experts representing and possessing insights into the group of stakeholders to evaluate the importance of the values. After a qualitative validation of the values, the best-worst method (Rezaei, 2015) was utilized to evaluate the importance of the values, which is a first notion to measure the importance of the values with this method, our methodological contribution. Three experts performed the qualitative validation of the values. The evaluation of the values with the best-worst method was conducted with ten experts for smart meters and showed privacy as the most important value for socio-political and household acceptance, as well as cost-effectiveness for market acceptance of smart meters. Due to different regulation about privacy, there was no socio-political acceptance for smart meters (Bellantuono, 2014; Cuijpers & Koops, 2013; Ligtvoet et al., 2015). Several scholars have stated that for end users of smart meters, privacy is particularly important (AlAbdulkarim et al., 2014; Cuijpers & Koops, 2013; Darby, 2012; Verbong et al., 2013). On the other hand, cost effectiveness depends on the size of the market (Erlinghagen et al. 2014), the installed base of smart meters (Van de Kaa et al. 2011), which requires the acceptance of the end users and their importance for privacy. The value hierarchy approach enables to formulate design requirements based on values. We demonstrate how design requirements can be formulated based on the value privacy. These design requirements should foster the social acceptance of the smart meters, although it is limited due the conflict with the other important value of cost effectiveness. Hence, the design requirements should be analyzed and evaluated with the other important values by the groups of stakeholders for acceptance. Further studies should segment the groups of stakeholder (e.g. different end user groups) to analyze their important values, which enables creating service and incentive mechanisms for a particular group of stakeholders. Moreover, other complex products and other regions should be analyzed with our multidisciplinary approach, which would enable us to generalize our approach.