Achieving Customer Adoption of the Smart Grid is Key to its Success

Aug. 31, 2010 - PRLog -- Phoenix, AZ,  -- As efforts to modernize the electricity grid role out across America, there's evidence that using smart grid technology will prove a tough sell to consumers, according to “Smart Grid: Achieving Customer Buy-in” a report by Energy Business Reports (http://energybusinessreports.com/shop/?affillink=PRL).
   
While the smart grid has been hailed as essential to America’s independent energy future, its success is determined by end users’ willingness to accept a shift in how they use and monitor their energy use. In a recent study, 68% of Americans have never heard of the smart grid, indicating that at the core of smart grid adoption efforts is customer education.

The “Smart Grid: Achieving Customer Buy-in” report examines how the industry can achieve customer adoption of smart grid technologies, and includes the results of a survey of 240 industry professionals including utility executives, professors, commercial users, and energy policy makers.

“It’s clear that the customers who DO understand what the smart grid is, still aren’t convinced that it will save them money, or benefit them in any other way. The industry must be able to demonstrate real savings through (successful) smart grid demonstration programs, and offer incentives for initial adoption,” says Barbara Drazga, Publisher, EnergyBusinessReports.com.

The smart grid vision is to create a fully integrated network that enables real-time information exchange between the utility and its customers, and provides diagnosis and resolution of problems by joining together transmission and distribution, communications, and back office systems.

But consumers are at worst, clueless to the smart grid concept, and at best, confused about how smart grid technologies will benefit them. According to Alan Destribats, Vice President, Utility Practice, JD Power and Associates “The rational for the smart grid has to be in the benefits to the consumer, how it will help the consumer save money and be more energy efficient. The consumer will only respond to positive benefits, not threats of higher on-peak rates or a utility controlling its appliances.”

In this “Smart Grid: Achieving Customer Buy-in” report, you’ll learn what utilities are doing right - and wrong ¬- in converting customers and making smart technologies more ‘user-friendly’, and discover what steps the utilities must take in order to increase consumer knowledge and acceptance of smart grid technologies.

This report sells for $297. View full details at:
http://energybusinessreports.com/shop/Smart-Grid-Gaining-...

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Energy Business Reports, an energy industry think tank and leading source for energy industry information and research products. For details on all reports can be found at http://energybusinessreports.com