Consumer Adoption Challenges To The Smart Grid

Abstract

The smart grid represents the next significant evolution of the power infrastructure with many enhancements and challenges. This paper provides a qualitative review of the key consumer adoption challenges of the smart grid. This literature review takes disparate pieces of work and identifies strategic research focal areas. Through existing research and media documents, it identifies the primary consumer adoption challenges as privacy, Radio Frequency (RF) safety, and power rate increases. It also provides a review of each adoption challenge. The review is applied to the Canadian perspective drawing from smart grid experiences across North America. The review demonstrates that each of the challenge areas has a negative impact on the adoption and support of the smart grid.

This paper recommends further in-depth research be conducted in the following areas: testing each of the consumer adoption challengesprivacy, RF Safety, and rate increasesseparately with quantitative measures; testing the willingness to accept a power infrastructure with the security and stability level of a bank; and testing the impact that proactively educating the public would have on the smart grid adoption.