Making Smart Meters Acceptable: An End-user Standpoint

This research studies one of the many energy-related issues of changing cities: the challenge of implementing smart meters at a household level, through the prism of users’ perception. We look into the acceptability of both the devices themselves and the smart meters-related behaviors, believed to decrease the households’ energy consumption. We model that acceptability thanks to a mix between Davis’ Technology Acceptance Model and Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior.
Our research then splits in two complementary field studies. The first one, mainly qualitative and exploratory, is conducted via two participatory workshops, allowing us to analyze opinions from both naive and smart meters-aware samples. We then confirm our first hypotheses through a quantitative online survey, distributed amongst an « early adopters » population.
That sample takes a favorable stance towards the adoption of smart meters, but demonstrates a fairly low level of instruction about the smart meter-related issues. Moreover, being highly smart meter-aware is not correlated to good dispositions, and people seem to overlook smart meter’s ability to decrease consumption and change behaviors.
Main factors fostering smart meters’ acceptability (and related energy-sparing behaviors’) seem to be perceived usefulness (both on an environmental and an economical level), perceived control over the behavior (along with high perceived privacy), perceived ease of use and perceived subjective norms.
Potential future paths to increase acceptability are then discussed, such as turning energy-reduction goals into concrete, everyday actions and consequences; gamification features and convergent, multi- sourced energy-related information.