Conceptions of end users in current smart grid research and opportunities for further social scientific research on users in smart grids

Many resources have been put into preparing our energy provision systems for a future with more distributed and intermittent energy production. Especially in Europe and the US a large amount of public research funds has gone to the research field of smart grids. Within policy communities and smart grid research communities there is a consensus that a changed user-system relation where users become sensitive to system level constraints is a key element of smart grids. However, the way this sensitivity is conceptualized and the nature of claims differs from one project to the other and sometimes even within research projects.
As the realization of smart grids becomes pressing the multitude of claims becomes a problem for the design of large scale demonstration projects and the planning of actual smart grid deployment. This fragmentation of research is recognized in existing reviews but so far there have been no attempts to handle it.
This paper suggests that classifying the research contributions according to the roles they assign to users and the theoretical concepts they employ to represent users can help in evaluating the validity of their claims, uncovering possibilities for synthesis of existing knowledge and seeing new possibilities for social scientific research where knowledge gaps appear.
Different user representations and user roles are found through a content analysis of project related documents from a selection of European and North American smart grid projects.
It is argued that differences between approaches can be found in: 1) The included time horizon; 2) The included social sphere; 3) Theoretical assumptions about behavior; 4) Theoretical assumptions about societal change.