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

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.