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Using information systems to improve energy efficiency: Do smart meters make a difference?

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Abstract

The large-scale generation of electricity is a major contributor to increasing levels of greenhouse gas emissions, putting pressure on the industry to reduce its environmental impacts. Electricity utility companies are looking to two strategies to help make this happen: the smart grid and demand-side management. Viewing the challenge from an IS perspective, this study attempts to answer the question: do smart grid information systems and technologies make a difference in utilities’ efforts to promote energy efficiency? Drawing on organizational information processing theory and extending it by integrating the concept of information waste, two competing hypotheses are developed and tested using hierarchical regression and data from 543 U.S. electricity utilities. The model, incorporating four levels of metering devices, is found to explain a high portion of the variance in energy efficiency effects of demand-side management programs. This suggests that there are IS-enabled information processing capacities within smart meters that have a significant influence on utilities’ EDM effectiveness. However, the results also point to the potential for both positive and negative effects. Implications of these findings for practice and future research directions are discussed.

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Notes

  1. The term “utility” is used to denote organizations that provide electricity to end customers. These organizations may or may not be vertically integrated across the electricity supply chain and may be private firms, cooperatives or government-owned.

  2. Most recent report available at the time the analysis was completed.

  3. In the Report, these devices are reported as AMI meters; however, to avoid confusion between the total AMI infrastructure and the metering devices, this paper refers to them as smart meters.

  4. In the Report, the effects of net metering in terms of reducing electricity consumption are isolated from the energy efficiency effects of EDM, so this does not affect the results.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Jane Webster, Brent Gallupe, Chialin Chen, the anonymous reviewers and special issue Editors for their comments on previous versions of the manuscript, and Peng Hu for his research assistance. This research was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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  1. Management Information Systems Department, Faculty of Business Administration, Université Laval, 2325, rue de la Terrasse, Québec, QC, Canada, G1V 0A6

    Jacqueline Corbett

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Correspondence to Jacqueline Corbett.

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Corbett, J. Using information systems to improve energy efficiency: Do smart meters make a difference?. Inf Syst Front 15, 747–760 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-013-9414-0

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