Download Adoption and Impacts of Smart Grid Technologies

Adoption and Impacts of Smart Grid Technologies:
Results of a Survey of U.S. Electric Utilities
Jason Dedrick and You Zheng
School of Information Studies, Syracuse University
Submitted to the 2016 Industry Studies Association Conference
Smart grid technologies offer benefits to utilities and customers, yet adoption has been. Given the
urgent need to modernize the U.S. electrical infrastructure and reduce its environmental impacts, we
ask the following questions:
(1) What is the level of adoption of smart grid technologies among U.S. utilities? (2) What are the main
motivations for adoption? (3) What are the main obstacles to adoption? (4) What are the main
organizational impacts of adoption? (5) How do factors such as ownership, size, expertise, management
attitudes, and regulatory environment influence adoption?
We report on a survey of 217 respondents from U.S. utility companies. Over half of these utilities have
deployed smart meters to most of their customer. Among grid-side technologies, the most widely
adopted are two-way SCADA, outage management systems (OMS) and meter data management
systems (MDMS). On the customer side, only web portals are widely adopted. The main motivations for
adoption are operational benefits such as reliability, efficiency and cost reduction. The main obstacles
are the perceived immaturity of smart grid technologies, lack of funds, and lack of internal expertise.
Adoption is higher in utilities with top management support, higher levels of expertise, greater
monitoring of the technology environment, and by investor-owned utilities.
We find that smart grid adoption requires integration of systems, breaking down organizational siloes,
making changes to existing processes, and acquiring new knowledge and skills. Organizational
challenges increase as firms move beyond adoption and try to capture value by integrating systems and
data across organizational boundaries.
This research is supported by a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (SES-1231192).
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