Smart Meter Promotion In China

With the rapid development of economic society, the demand of energy is steadily on the increase, which contributes to the energy shortage and environmental stress. According to the survey, household energy use is responsible for the great proportion of total each country’s energy consumption, which certainly adds to the energy shortage problem. Therefore, governments all around the world are committed to looking for the new energy and new technology in order to solve the existing problems. In recent years, the smart grid construction has been received widespread attention around the world. It not only has powerful resources optimization ability, but also can catalyze the clean energy growth, effectively improve the efficiency of energy transmission and use. Consequently, smart grid construction will conducive to alleviate the current energy shortage and environmental issues, catalyze new energy use, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote the development of low-carbon economy. In addition, as intelligent terminal of the smart grid, smart meter is an important part of the smart grid construction, a significant measure of reducing excessive use of electricity and energy waste, an important means to realize the optimization of energy and intelligent power transmission. Moreover, smart meter not only can offer the real-time feedback electrical expenditure information to the users, but also can display quantity of electrical power and gas used by various household appliances in detail, so as to help users to eliminate the inefficient use of electricity and gas. Hence, the wide use of smart meter and smart grid is the inevitable trend of the economic society. It will make great significant to the development of economy and society and bring many benefits to the users.At present, European and America countries have made great achievements in the construction of smart grid, while China starts late. However, now it has been included in the "twelfth five-year" plan in our country and has been received strong support from the government. Compared with European and American countries, the promotion and use of the smart meter is also relatively backward. Hence, this dissertation will study how to promote smart meter widely used in our country, finding the factors that affect the popularization of smart meter in China’s market, so as to put forward reasonable suggestions to increase the use of smart meters. This dissertation firstly will study the situation of use of smart meter at home and abroad, and also explain related theory of smart meter and technology acceptance in detail, thus for later research hypothesis and research design; then it will collect data through questionnaires and analyze it in order to understand the main factors that affect users decision of using smart meter; after that, based on the usage of smart meter in United Kingdom and the fundamental situation of China, this dissertation conducted comparative analysis of the differences of smart meter usage in UK and China. Through this analysis, learnt from the precedents of smart meter promotion in UK, this dissertation will generate effective suggestions of smart meter promotion in China.