Smart grid customers’ acceptance and engagement: An overview

Since societies depend on energy and its management, extensive changes in energy-related technologies, such as the Smart Grid (SG), are likely to bring out subsequently enormous forms of social change. Imagine, there are several claims about the risks that lie ahead as conventional energy resources terminated, as populations increase, and as assumption accelerate. Therefore, the future societies will be subject to creative development and wide-ranging transformation to optimize their energy consumption. The SG can integrate an assorted set of electricity resources, containing large power plants as well as distributed renewable energy resources, electric energy storage, demand response, and electric vehicles. In line with many visions for the SG, consumers will play a more ‘active’ role in the future energy systems. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure customers’ acceptance to successfully build a SG. The eventual deployment of the SG depends on the consumers’ acceptance of SG products and services. Yet fully engaging the residential space in the SG remains a challenge. This work aims to provide energy systems researchers and decision makers with proper insight into the underlying drivers of consumer acceptance of the SG and the logical steps for their engagement to promote the SG technology and making it feasible in a timely manner.