Biblio

Building on privacy principles of the Fair Information Practice Principles and the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, the study compares national policies and programs in Europe and North America and identifies prevailing practices for implementing privacy goals for residential energy customers: customer opt-out policies, sampling and sharing guidelines, independent data storage, and governmental enforcement authority. The analysis provides the basis for privacy standards that could apply to advanced-metering customer data across countries, even with rapidly evolving technology.

Utilities and local power providers throughout the world have recognized the advantages of the "smart grid" to encourage consumers to engage in greater energy efficiency. The digitalization of electricity and the consumer interface enables utilities to develop pricing arrangements that can smooth peak load. Time-varying price signals can enable devices associated with heating, air conditioning, and ventilation (HVAC) systems to communicate with market prices in order to more efficiently configure energy demand. Moreover, the shorter time intervals and greater collection of data can facilitate the integration of distributed renewable energy into the power grid. This study contributes to the understanding of time-varying pricing using a model that examines the extent to which transactive energy can reduce economic costs of an aggregated group of households with varying levels of distributed solar energy. It also considers the potential for transactive energy to smooth the demand curve.

The transition to connected and autonomous (or automated) vehicles (CAVs) in the United States is used to explore the role of civil society in the acceleration and deceleration of sociotechnical transitions. This is an “incumbent-led transition,” which occurs when large industrial corporations in one or more industries lead a systemic technological change. This type of transition may generate public concerns about risk and uncertainty, which can be expressed and mobilized by civil society organizations (CSOs). In turn, CSOs may also attempt to decelerate the transition process in order to develop better regulation and to change technology design. Based on an analysis of CSO statements in the public sphere and media reports on CAVs in the U.S., the political strategy of CSOs is examined to improve understanding of the role of civil society in incumbent-led transitions. The analysis indicates that the strategy includes four main aspects: articulating an alternative political goal (slower introduction of advanced autonomous vehicles and more rapid introduction of existing driver-assisted technology), engaging multiple targets or venues of action (different government units and the private sector), forming and expanding a broad coalition, and selecting effective tactics of influence (lobbying, media outreach, and research involving public opinion polls).