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Service Requirements for Consumer Engagement in the German Energy Retail Market
Abstract
Current changes in energy provision are forcing changes in the relationships between provider and consumer. Nowhere is this more evident than in the transition to renewable energy sources, where ongoing structural changes create new stakeholder roles, new value chains, and a renewed focus on the concepts of service requirements and public acceptance. Especially public acceptance in the energy sector is under addressed in research due to its domain specificity and low generalizability. This research empirically addresses the intersections between public acceptance, energy service markets, and quality of service to provide first insights into the drivers of service requirements in the German energy value chain.
... Table 2 provides an overview of the research questions and the corresponding question categories. For further details, see Appendix 1 or Bertsch et al. [37]. ...
The rapid expansion of renewable energy sources (RES) in many European countries brings about transmission grid expansion requirements. While the transition towards RES-based energy systems is largely perceived positively in general, locally both RES and grid expansion are often confronted with a lack of public acceptance. Using Germany as a case study, we analyse public acceptance of energy infrastructure and its main drivers on local vs. national levels. For this purpose, we conducted a nationally representative survey. Our results show that, on a national level, the acceptance of RES is very high and there is also a high acceptance of grid expansion if it helps to increase the share of RES in the system. In terms of local acceptance problems that may arise for most considered technologies, concerns about landscape modification turn out to be the main driving factor. Moreover, the distance between places of residence and places of energy infrastructure construction is crucial. While acceptance or rejection of technologies will never be entirely tangible or explicable, we find the explicability of rejections to be lowest for new technologies. Finally, age and education turn out to be the most relevant socio-demographic variables determining the participants' acceptance.
... Foundational to this paper is the need to move from a theoretical standpoint to applied transformative service research. Not only does this work set the stage for the theoretical contribution in Chapters 2 and 3 (Foundations and Related Work), it has also begot two applied service research studies: service zone design as a tool for public good in the case of food deserts (Johann et al. 2014) and service requirements for citizen participation in the German national legislative action Energiewende (Energy Transformation) (Bertsch et al. 2015). ...
In this thesis, the challenges of defining, refining, and applying well-being as a progressive management indicator are addressed. This work's implications and contributions are highly relevant for service research as it advances the integration of consumer well-being and the service value chain. It also provides a substantial contribution to policy and strategic management by integrating constituents' values and experiences with recommendations for progressive community management.
The increasing share of renewable energy sources in European electricity markets raises the interest in leverag-ing demand flexibility also on a residential level. While in traditional residential electricity tariffs, the provided service consists mainly in the delivery of electricity in the right amount and at the right time, more recent tariff structures, especially innovative ones with variable capacity prices, are more sophisticated. In the context of these new tariffs, service level agreements offer a good opportunity to ensure that providers and consumers of that service have a common understanding of its quality. Therefore, a set of four suitable service level indicators for tariffs with variable capacity prices is developed in this paper. Furthermore, possible approaches to derive related service level objectives and possibilities for providing decision support to customers in choosing a tariff are introduced.
The energy sector continues to undergo substantial structural changes. Currently, the expansion of renewable energy sources and the decentralisation of energy supply lead to
new players entering the market who pursue different objectives and have different preferences. Thus, multiple and usually conflicting targets need to be considered.Moreover, recent public reactions towards infrastructure projects highlight the importance of considering public acceptance as a key dimension of decision making in the energy sector.As a result, decision processes grow more complex at all levels from political to strategic, tactical and operational decisions in companies.We therefore present an approach combining power systems analysis considering grid constraints and multi-criteria decision analysis. The approach focusses on multi-dimensional sensitivity analyses allowing for simultaneous variations of the different preference parameters determined within the decision analysis aimed at facilitating preference elicitation and consensus building in group decisions. The focus of the paper is the demonstration of the presented approach for a power generation and transmission planning case study in the context of the energy transition in Germany.
Transformative services represent a crucial topic in future service research. Particularly in the energy sector, consumer adoption of transformative—often IT-enabled—services is essential to increased environmental sustainability. As adopting these services increases both individual and collective well-being, research has to delve more deeply into the origins of consumers’ motivations. For this reason, this study aims at augmenting the understanding of how different types of motivation determine consumers’ intention to adopt transformative services. The proposed model integrates the theory of planned behavior and the self-determination theory and is tested with survey data gathered from 462 users and 537 nonusers of home energy management services. Results indicate that consumers’ motivations are major direct determinants of intentions to adopt. While this finding notably holds when consumers perceive the adoption as self-determined and internalize associated values such as environmentalism, motivations based on external rewards and feelings of compulsion matter to a lesser extent. A comparison of users and nonusers reveals important differences in motivation, in particular that extrinsic motivations tend to be more relevant for nonusers than for users.
This paper extends the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) to study acceptance and use of technology in a consumer context. Our proposed UTAUT2 incorporates three constructs into UTAUT: hedonic motivation, price value, and habit. Individual differences — namely, age, gender, and experience — are hypothesized to moderate the effects of these constructs on behavioral intention and technology use. Results from a two-stage online survey, with technology use data collected four months after the first survey, of 1,512 mobile Internet consumers supported our model. Compared to UTAUT, the extensions proposed in UTAUT2 produced a substantial improvement in the variance explained in behavioral intention (56 percent to 74 percent) and technology use (40 percent to 52 percent). The theoretical and managerial implications of these results are discussed.
SERVQUAL:
A Multiple-Item Scale for Measuring Consumer Perceptions of
Service Quality
A. PARASURAMAN
Foley's/Federated Professor of Retailing and Marketing Studies
Texas A & M University College Station, Texas
VALARIE A. ZEITHAML
Associate Professor
of Marketing Duke University
Raleigh-Durham, N. Carolina
LEONARD L. BERRY
Foley's/Federated Professor of Retailing and Marketing Studies
Texas A & M University College Station, Texas
This paper describes the development of a 22-item instrument (called SERVQUAL) for assessing customer perceptions of service quality in service and retailing organizations. After a discussion of the conceptu alization and operationalization of the service quality construct, the procedures used in constructing and refining a multiple-item scale to measure the construct are described. Evidence of the scale's reliability, factor structure, and validity on the basis of analyzing data from four independent samples is presented next. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential applications ef the scale.
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Interest in the problem of method biases has a long history in the behavioral sciences. Despite this, a comprehensive summary of the potential sources of method biases and how to control for them does not exist. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which method biases influence behavioral research results, identify potential sources of method biases, discuss the cognitive processes through which method biases influence responses to measures, evaluate the many different procedural and statistical techniques that can be used to control method biases, and provide recommendations for how to select appropriate procedural and statistical remedies for different types of research settings.
This review specifically investigates the concepts of energy poverty and energy ladders. It provides the most current available data on energy poverty, electrification, and dependency on biomass fuels for cooking. It elaborates on the relationship between energy access and millennium development goals, especially the connection between modern energy services and development, public health, gender empowerment, and the degradation of the natural environment. It notes that energy poverty has serious and growing public health concerns related to indoor air pollution, physical injury during fuelwood collection, and lack of refrigeration and medical care in areas that lack electricity. It argues that energy poverty affects both the gender roles within society and the educational opportunities available to children and adults. It documents that the environmental impacts of energy poverty encompass deforestation and changes in land use, as well as the emission of greenhouse gases. The final section of the review underscores the structural elements of the global energy system that entrench and sustain energy poverty.
The rapid expansion of Internet users has given Web-based surveys the potential to become a powerful tool in survey research. As an application of this technique for gathering data, the International Student Survey was designed to explore factors that might influence choices of college majors and the social support network system among international students at Arizona State University. Cover letters with the links to a Web-based questionnaire were sent through e-mail to the entire international students population. Given that no incentive was offered, this study received a total of 929 completed surveys for an overall response rate of 22% after three waves of solicitations. This article discusses the methodological concerns and problems that arise from using Web surveys, including noncoverage, nonresponse errors, confidentiality concerns, and technical problems. Suggestions for improving response rates also are discussed.
This paper investigates how expected and actual questionnaire length affects cooperation rates and a variety of indicators
of data quality in web surveys. We hypothesized that the expected length of a web-based questionnaire is negatively related
to the initial willingness to participate. Moreover, the serial position of questions was predicted to influence four indicators
of data quality. We hypothesized that questions asked later in a web-based questionnaire will, compared to those asked earlier,
be associated with (a) shorter response times, (b) higher item-nonresponse rates, (c) shorter answers to open-ended questions,
and (d) less variability to items arranged in grids. To test these assumptions, we manipulated the stated length (10, 20,
and 30 minutes) and the position of questions in an online questionnaire consisting of randomly ordered blocks of thematically
related questions. As expected, the longer the stated length, the fewer respondents started and completed the questionnaire.
In addition, answers to questions positioned later in the questionnaire were faster, shorter, and more uniform than answers
to questions positioned near the beginning.