A survey towards understanding residential prosumers in smart grid neighbourhoods

The smart grid and its promises have sparked world-wide research and demonstration projects, some of which focus on how to empower its users with better tools to monitor, understand, and manage their energy behaviour. It is often seen, however, that the providers of the tools may be driven by a technology push, and hence make assumptions that may fall a short of users´ expectations. The lack of understanding on the real-world needs of the users as well as the impact of new technologies and tools may lead to the underestimation or the abandonment of innovative approaches. The issues of how the future smart city residential prosumer will benefit from the future smart grid services and what trade-offs s/he will be willing to make are hot topics. Here, a survey is presented that focuses on these aspects, and especially on the goal of providing new value-added energy services to end-users. An analysis of the survey results and key messages identifies research gaps and proposes promising directions that may be followed when designing applications and services for the residential smart grid prosumers.