Home-personas meet energy narratives of demand response: Uncovering mismatches between Swedish stakeholder expectations and everyday life

Smart grids are proposed to enable the integration of renewables and facilitate the energy transition. Households have been pointed out as a significant resource for demand response, that is to adapt their electricity consumption based on the status in the grid. This article analyses narrative mismatches in the context of smart grid implementation in Sweden. We compare policy narratives on the role of homes in the future energy system with home personas, emerging from interviews with households. The policy narratives envision households to become either actively engaged in time-shifting motivated by information and incentives, or bypassed through automation. The home personas, although seemingly similar, show great diversity, being well informed about their electricity use, concerned regarding the safety of technology, preferring to manage flexibility themselves, and reluctant to give up control. Several dissonances are identified between narratives and the home personas regarding smart meter communication, energy awareness, trust, agency, and control, that need further attention for demand response to be realised. The analysis illustrates how policy visions of the home in the future grid would encounter severe challenges in living up to values and characteristics of real households. Policy thus needs to acknowledge households as a diverse group to ensure a sustainable and democratic energy transition. We encourage the use of home personas to substantiate this diversity.