1

Background infoSex: Female Age: 60

Family status: Married, with two children no longer living at home.

Education level: Higher humanistic educa-tion.

Disposable income: Medium-High.

Residential status and daily logistics:She lives in a single-family house heated by heat pump in a suburb of Copenhagen. Hardly ever commutes by car, but uses bike or public transport instead.

Real life story: An eFlex project participant learned that it can be beneficial for the system, for the soci-ety and the environment to use electricity at night. Suddenly, she was happy about her need to get up every night to pee, because it made it easier to start the washing machine at night!

”When we do something, it may as well be sustainable”

Mrs. do-the-right-thing

2

Key CharacteristicsMotivations: Environment/society, economics, technology.She cares about the environment, but within reason and with an eye to practicality. For instance, she buys organic food as long as the price difference is acceptable, and she has an interest in the climate debate and ‘doing the right thing’. She is interested in energy savings for the environment and in saving a little money. She has a low interest in technology, but chooses the ‘right’ technology when needed and uses technology to make informed choices.

Challenges: With a relatively high disposable income and surplus time after her kids leaving home, she lives an easy life with few challenges other than self-chosen professional challenges at work.

Dreams and goals: To ‘do the right thing’ for herself, others and the environment and to leave a safe world for her children and grandchildren.

Special abilities or inabilities: She’s not very technically skilled and prefers communication via phone or face to face meet-ings.

First or late mover: Relatively late mover, influenced by trusted peers e.g. relatives and friends.

Attitude towards flexibility?: As long as it benefits the environment and maybe even saves a bit of money, she is willing to change habits such as laundering at night.

Occurrence: Mrs do-the-right-thing is primarily based on eFlex’ “The Participatory” user profile (accounting for 18% of the participants) and COWI’s (2013) Believer cluster. This statistically significant cluster drops from around 40% of the population below age 30 to 25% between age 30 and 49, while rising to around 30% in age 50 to 60 and around 37% from age 60 and older.Source material: Antropologerne 2012, COWI 2013, and Insero 2014.

3

“Sure I would like to do the right thing, but I have so little time for it…”

Background infoSex: Female Age: 34

Family status: Married, with 2 small kids

Education level: Further education

Disposable income: Despite high income level it is relatively low due to high fixed expenses and being relatively new on the labour market etc.

Residential status and daily logistics:She recently bought a house in a suburb of Copenhagen and commutes by car for prac-ticality

Real life story: N/A

Lifestyler

4

Key CharacteristicsMotivations: Environment/society, economics, technology.She used to care about the environment, but now prioritizes convenience in everyday family life higher through, e.g., commuting by car to work. She makes environmentally benign choices when it also concerns her children’s wellbeing, e.g., buys organic food and non-toxic toys. If the environmental benign choice is also the most comfortable choice and not too expensive, she would go for it. New technology interests her if it saves her time and adds convenience in family life.

Challenges: She used to care more about the environment, but now she finds it hard to find the time and resources to prioritize it in a family with 2 small kids and 2 full-time jobs.

Dreams and goals: Right now she dreams of more quality time with her family and for herself, and less time doing tedious household chores.

Special abilities or inabilities: To a very limited extent would she be able to change electricity consumption schedules from on-demand household-chores (e.g. cooking, laundering etc.).

First or late mover:With little time to investigate new technology she won’t be the first mover, but she could be influenced by friends, colleagues or other peers.

Attitude towards flexibility?: It cannot compromise everyday convenience, but if it’s easy to be flexible and enables her to do the right thing and save money, it’s ok

Occurrence: The Lifestyler is based on Insero Livelabs ‘The comfort position’ and COWI’s (2013) Lifestyler cluster. This statistically significant cluster rises from about 40% of the respondents below age 30 to about 64% of the respondents aging from 30 to 49 and 55% from age 50 to 59, after which it drops dramatically. This could mean that many Believers turn Lifestylers when entering the workforce and family life (the average age of Danish first-time mothers is 29 ), while reverting to Believers at a later stage, when work and family life become less demanding.Source material: COWI 2013, Insero 2014 and DST 2014.

5

Background infoSex: Male Age: 61

Family status: Married, with three children no longer living at home

Education level: Craft-oriented education

Disposable income: Low to medium

Residential status and daily logistics:Lives in a house in a small village in western Denmark, commutes by car (or truck or tractor depending on task at hand)

Real life story: In two almost identical villages in Southwestern Denmark, all of the inhabi-tants in one village choose wood-pellet boi-lers while the inhabitants of the other village choose heat pumps to replace their oil-fired boiler. Why? Because one local ambassador of each technology has introduced (know-how about) the technology in the village, leading to peer recommendations and com-petencies within that technology in the local community.

“Why pay for something you can do better yourself?”

Autonomous Sceptic

6

Key CharacteristicsMotivations: Environment/society, economics, technology.He is not concerned with the environment, and rarely buys organic food, unless it is a bet-ter deal than non-organic – because bargains are the only deals worth doing!The local community is very important to him, both for social wellbeing and for solving everyday challenges. He cultivates his local network with favors (for favors in return) and by engaging in local events.He is mostly interested in technology he can use and repair himself, with a “self-sufficien-cy” mindset.

Challenges: He does not like new technology he cannot fix himself, but as technology becomes more advanced, it proves a greater challenge than it used to be.

Dreams and goals: He seeks to cover the basic needs by making good bargains and do-it-yourself solutions in replacing obsolete products.

Special abilities or inabilities: He is a true handyman and can fix most things himself – partly because he mostly invests in technologies, he can fix himself.

First or late mover:He will not invest in new or unknown technology unless his trusted peers from the local community recommend it – and new technology is not relevant until the old breaks down!

Attitude towards flexibility?: If it’s a bargain he would be interested in flexible consumption, even if it requires an extra (manual) effort, but the technology should not deprive him of his self-sufficiency.

Occurrence: Dominant in the DREAM project but also inspired by COWI’s “Sceptic” segment, rising slowly from around 10% of the population at age 30 to 45% of the population age 70+. Source material: DTI 2014 and COWI 2013.

7

“As long as we can avoid waste of resources and save money…”

Background infoSex: Male Age: 39

Family status: Married, with 2 children living at home

Education level: Business oriented vocatio-nal education

Disposable income: High, with higher house-hold income and relatively modest fixed expenses

Residential status and daily logistics:Lives in a house located in a minor town and commutes by car to jobs in the nearest major city

Real life story: One of the e-Flex participants had the ener-gy consumption of the family as a hobby and considered the smart energy management equipment provided by the project as a gift, allowing the family to engage in that hobby several times a day. According to the parti-cipant, every single unit in the house should be connected to the energy management system.

Rational Man

8

Key CharacteristicsMotivations: Environment/society, economics, technologyThe Rational Man is an economically oriented rational optimizer of time and resource consumption of the entire family. He tracks the energy consumption of the household, primarily motivated by finding and realizing savings for himself and the family. Rational Man searches for new technology that can help him identify important saving potentials for the entire family and provide feedback on their efforts. In addition to more automatic saving solutions, he is willing to conduct simple behavior changes for saving money (e.g. only charging electrical devices at night) – but he is not particularly preoccupied by the environment.

Challenges: Rational Man is mostly challenged by self-imposed challenges at job, by everyday family life etc. He discusses his motivations and effort for savings with the entire family: they all must take active part in the required change of behavior to save time and resources. When things get tough he seeks to rationally work his way to a better situation.

Dreams and goals: The optimization approach of the Rational Man applies to his goals as well, where he stri-ves for a good carrier, an enjoyable family life, and economic freedom to pursue his and his family’s interests.

Special abilities or inabilities: Being a rational optimizer, he is skilled at handling numbers, and if the data visualization provided by his energy management system doesn’t suffice, he takes the data to excel to conduct his own analysis – the consumption data is very important to him.

First or late mover:If he can see a potential for reducing the time or resource consumption of the family, he could be among the first to invest in new technology.

Attitude towards flexibility?: Even for smaller savings, he is willing to undergo minor behavior changes such as washing clothes and dishwashing at night.

Occurrence: The rational man is rather well-represented in demonstration projects, e.g. accounting for 24% of the eFlex participants. However, eFlex concluded that the participation and moti-vation for demand response was not merely based on economic incentives and that the participants economic rationales were complex and diverse. As the Rational Man could be expected to visit elpristavlen.dk to compare electricity prices and change supplier for savings, the 160,000 to 370,000 unique visits per year could be an estimate of the real life occurrence of smart grid interested Rational Men.Source material: Antropologerne 2012, COWI 2013, Hansen & Borup 2014 and DEA 2014.

9

“I do this for the sake of the society – and to develop my professional skills”

Background infoSex: Male Age: 45

Family status: Married, with two children living at home.

Education level: Higher technical education.

Disposable income: Medium to high.

Residential status and daily logistics:Lives in a house in a suburb of Copenhagen and often commutes by bike, but also car or public transport.

Real life story: An eFlex participant continuously adjusts the flow temperature and speed of his heat pump to optimize the energy consump-tion. In eFlex he uses the provided energy management system to monitor correlations between heat pump operation and outdoor temperature and engages in technical discus-sions with DONG Energy and other lead technologists in the project.

Lead Technologist

10

Key CharacteristicsMotivations: Environment/society, economics, technologyThe lead technologist is highly driven by his own professional skills and insights into the development of technology and society as a whole. He knows that both society and techno-logy must change and develop to meet the (energy) needs of the current and future gene-rations, which leads him to engage in and contribute to this development both at work and at home. Experimenting with new technology to learn and to develop his professional and personal skills also drives him, while economic incentives are of less importance.

Challenges: The lead technologist often challenges himself with projects in which he can activate and develop his personal skills. At home, however, it is a solo project that sometimes meets resi-stance from the family, who does not share his passion for technology and is annoyed when things do not work. And the family is dependent on his skills to make (his modified) things work.

Dreams and goals: To contribute to the development of a (more sustainable) future electricity system and to society as a whole – and to develop his professional skills while doing so.

Special abilities or inabilities: The lead technologist is highly technically skilled and can use the most advanced technolo-gies, as well as improve them.

First or late mover:A true lead user, who wishes to experiment with new technology, to learn and to educate his peers.

Attitude towards flexibility?: The lead technologist is quite positive towards flexibility due to the environmental, societal and economic advantages from it.

Occurrence: A very predominant user type in smart grid demonstration projects, e.g. accounting for 24% of the eFlex participants. Due to their high degree of professional interest in the topic, howe-ver, they are unlikely to represent 24% of the population. As bachelors or masters of science on the Danish labor market only account for approximately 100,000 persons or 1.8% of the populationix, the occurrence of Lead technologists is likely to be quite low.Source material: Antropologerne 2012 and Damvad 2011.

11

“It doesn’t work – could you help me, please?”

Background infoSex: Female

Age: 76

Family status: Widow with 3 children and several grandchildren.

Education level: Vocational education, now retired.

Disposable income: Medium with a mix of relatively low fixed expenses and income based on pension savings.

Residential status and daily logistics:Lives in a house in a small town. Being reti-red, she has no daily commutes, but often visits her children and grandchildren by car.

Real life story: A Danish developer of smart home systems (to control heat, ventilation and light) once found a surprising insight from qualitative customer interviews: During a real estate deal, customers experienced that their smart home system became an argument from potential buyers of their house to negotiate the price down. Why? Because they didn’t like the information panel and because they were sure their parents could not operate the system, when they were to babysit the children.

Technology shy

12

Key CharacteristicsMotivations: Environment/society, economics, technologyThe technology-shy is rather sceptic towards climate change and other environmen-tal aspects and has little interest in changing habits other than to accommodate her children’s and grandchildren’s priorities of e.g. organic food. Technology does not interest her – in fact, she does what she can to avoid new, unfamiliar technology in her home.

Challenges: With a declining visual acuity and low interest in new technologies, her lack of skills and indifferent attitude towards new technology makes it a greater challenge to start using new technology for each time, and increases her dependency on relatives to help her use it.

Dreams and goals: To enjoy retirement with her children, grandchildren and hopefully great-grandchildren and experience them do well.

Special abilities or inabilities: Whenever a device or appliance becomes obsolete and must be replaced, her lack of tech-nical skills challenges her adoption of new technology.

First or late mover:Among the late movers, she would only invest in new technologies when her old equip-ment must be replaced, in which case she consults her younger family members for advice.

Attitude towards flexibility?: If it runs on a “set it and forget it” mode and saves her money she might consume elec-tricity flexibly - but only if her trusted peers would recommend it and take charge of the implementation.

Occurrence: The technology-shy has not been present in any smart grid studies or projects, although inspired by the sceptic elder part of the population identified by COWI 2013iii. The real life story is from DTI consultancy work for clients.Source material: Mostly a fictive character, but inspired by COWI 2013 and DTI consultancy work for clients supplying smart home systems.

13

”I’m good at what I do, but those manufacturers sure didn’t think of us techni-cians when they designed their equipment.”

Background infoSex: Male Age: 42

Family status: Divorced, with 3 joint-custody children living with him every other weekend.

Education level: Craft education: Plumber

Disposable income: Medium, with moderate expenses and medium income.

Residential status and daily logistics:Lives in a house in a small town, commutes by car (often company car).

Real life story: In the process of moving into a new house, one of the authors had a plumber to check the installations in the house, including the gas furnace. In less than 45 minutes, the plumber had checked and maintained the furnace, repaired a couple of defect radiator valves (free of charge), identified defects and calculated saving potentials by replacing the furnace and a defect central heating pump and delivered an offer by email to replace the whole thing (by communicating with back office personnel). He would furthermore

Installation contractor

14

only recommend and install one brand of gas furnaces, as his company had chosen to specialize themselves in this brand, due to an extremely low fault rate and better war-ranty conditions.

Key CharacteristicsMotivations: Environment/society, economics, technologyInstallation contractor is not particularly concerned about the environment compared to his everyday comfort and other interests. For instance, he commutes by car and has a Jacuzzi installed in his house, although he rarely uses it. He tries not to waste money, but is not prepared to change habits or lower comfort limits to do so. New technology inte-rests him, especially within his professional field and hobbies.

Challenges: Installation contractor is mostly challenged at work, where he finds it quite tight to deli-ver the promised installations on time and budget, and at home, solving the puzzles of a divorced family.

Dreams and goals: Experiencing energy self-sufficiency has started a discussion among the Prosumption optimizers and their local community of how they can collectively benefit from their own surplus electricity production: “The most awesome thing that we could do here is to collect it up, so that many units together saved the energy, so that the whole city could contribute to heating up a pool, where all the energy was being used to heat up water that was going to be heated anyway”

Special abilities or inabilities: Installation contractor is technically skilled through his craft profession and has strong opinions on the technology he uses when at work.

First or late mover:For technologies relevant to his craft, he is often among the early adaptors, once the tech-nology has proven its worth. He prefers having firsthand experiences to advise customers about the technology.

Attitude towards flexibility?: As long as it does not interfere with his everyday life, comfort and hobbies, he is willing to consume flexibly to avoid wasting money.

Occurrence: Installation contractor is mostly a fictive character, but inspired by interviews of heat pumps owners. Furthermore, a regression analysis by Epinion has shown that the two primary factors to make a customer purchase a heat pump are (1) that it is necessary to invest in a new heat source and (2) that a plumber or manufacturer guides the process.Source material: Nyborg 2014, Maagensen & Krøjgaard 2013, Epinion 2010.

15

“I have a need to optimize ac-cording to my solar cells, ac-cording to what we produce ourselves”

Background info

Sex: Male + female Age: 31 and 28

Family status: Living together.

Education level: Bachelor of Economics and IT + Bachelor in Nursing.

Disposable income: Medium with medium income and low fixed expenses.

Residential status and daily logistics:They live in a house in a small village in the Triangle Region. He works daytime as a technical salesman, she often works in the evening, night or weekend, and both commute by car.

Real life story: One of the female residents in Insero’s Livelab has a lot of spare time at home during dayti-me, when the PV panels produce a lot. When their own production is high, she activates every possible electricity consuming device, to maximize the utilization of the PV panels.

Prosumption optimizers

16

Key CharacteristicsMotivations: Environment/society, economics, technologyAfter having PV solar panels installed, the couple have become very attentive to their elec-tricity production and consumption. Since they missed the ‘net-meter agreement’, they are annoyed whenever they produce more electricity than they consume, as they deliver elec-tricity (almost) free to the grid, while paying for it whenever they consume more than they produce. It is a question of avoiding waste, but it also becomes a sport for them to see how much they can utilize their own production – and save. Their general interest in technology also encompasses technologies that help them optimize their prosumption.

Challenges: The Prosumption optimizers have few critical challenges other than self-imposed ones, and they have flexibility in everyday life, e.g., to optimize their consumption of different resour-ces.

Dreams and goals: Experiencing energy self-sufficiency has started a discussion among the Prosumption opti-mizers and their local community of how they can collectively benefit from their own sur-plus electricity production: “The most awesome thing that we could do here is to collect it up, so that many units together saved the energy, so that the whole city could contribute to heating up a pool, where all the energy was being used to heat up water that was going to be heated anyway”.

Special abilities or inabilities: With him being technologically skilled and her having a lot of time at home during sunny hours, the couple are able to move a

large part of their electricity consumption, either manually or automatically.

First or late mover:After experiencing the economic consequences of flexible consumption, the couple could be among the first movers of technologies making it easier to move consumption.

Attitude towards flexibility?: They are very flexible due to motivation and skills, but primarily in order to maximize the utilization of their own production, not to benefit “the grid”.

Occurrence: The Prosumption optimizers will mostly occur among residents with their own electricity production (either individual or locally collective), where PVs will be the dominating electri-city source. As of November 19, 2014, there are 89815 PV installations throughout Denmark, with Jutlandic regions leading in numbers. Depending on whether the owners will be com-pensated for own surplus power production in the future, the Prosumption optimizers could become a relevant user group in the future. Furthermore, the playful approach to energy savings and flexible consumption has been observed in several smart grid studies, e.g. “the curious” eFlex profile accounting for 21% of the participants.Source material: Hansen 2014, Antropologerne 2012, Energinet.dk 2014.