Global warming requires an energy transition that allows people to consume energy while emit-ting less greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, new issues emerge such as how to motivate people to adopt renewable energies and how the infrastructure will need to adapt to the coming changes in the energy supply. Electricity grids have been made considering that fossils fuels will provide flexibility, but in the next decades the supply will be more and more weather de-pendant and thus, flexibility must be found elsewhere. Storage is a limited solution, and we can expect the flexibility to come from the demand-side. Since the 80’s decades, Demand-Side Management (DSM) is growing, and utilities experienced different DSM methods. End-users’ consumption should adapt to the increasing intermittent patterns of production, and price in-centives have been used to do so. It is not realistic to imagine this to be either efficient or reliable enough to secure all the needs of flexibility for the grid. Thus, the use of automation seems to be a better solution to provide flexibility on the demand-side, but this solution is also linked with several disadvantages for end-users such as loss of control, data security, or discomfort.
Therefore, for adopting automated DSM, end-users must be convinced. This master’s thesis aims to review the conclusion of the literature and the field regarding each non-technical factor that restrains automated DSM by limiting the frame to Swiss Households. The Social License (SL) concept is used to observe by which ways are built the permanent acceptance of projects as well as community support. It has been applied since decades to the mining sector but also plenty other sectors such as wind turbines or forestry, but, so far, it has never been used in the field of DSM. We think it would be relevant to read end-users willingness to accept automated DSM projects in the mirror of the Social License concept. This induces identifying what is relevant to reach acceptance and, what should be done to make end-users approve the projects and to identify themselves to them.
In the frame of this thesis, we performed a systematic literature review of 11 Swiss Surveys and a cross-case study of 8 field projects. We combined those two methods to build a narrative about how to earn economic legitimacy, socio-political legitimacy, interactional trust, and in-stitutionalized trust (that are embedded in the Social License concept).
