Conference article

Research has shown that feedback on energy use can aid households to reduce it significantly. In this context, smart metering technologies, and more specifically technology components interacting with data gathered and provided by a smart meter, allowing to provide the consumer with personalized feedback, consumption visualization, automated control,… could play an important role. After all, by means of this technology, households can be made more aware of their energy use and encouraged to reduce it. This paper applies a user centered approach towards the estimation of the adoption potential for smart metering technologies in Flanders, Belgium. We conducted a representative quantitative survey with 1314 respondents living in Flanders. A segmentation on ownership of, attitude towards and adoption intention of smart metering devices was performed on the data. Traditional approaches of intention surveying often result in an overestimation of the innovation adoption potential. To overcome this problem, the Product Specific Adoption Potential scale (or PSAP-scale) was used and 6 segments were found. These segments were labeled “Current Owners”, “Innovators”, “Early Adopters”, “Early Majority”, “Later Adopters” and “Out of Potentials. The verification of the adoption potential of smart metering devices for different pricing scenarios revealed a rather high price sensitivity.

Consumer behaviour; smart metering; adoption potential; willingness to pay