Between users, functions, and evaluations: Exploring the social acceptance of smart energy homes in China

The effectiveness of smart home energy technology in saving residential energy has been widely accepted. China has a huge market for the development of smart home energy technology; however, the household penetration rate in China is still at a low level, and one likely reason derives from the gap between the functions and user’s experience or expectations. The aim of this paper is to bridge the gap by developing entropy weighting based evaluation system for the performance of smart home energy technology. To achieve this objective, the processes include discovering key performance indicators of smart home energy technology by literature review; conducting a questionnaire survey in Guangdong province of China considering the macro-environment of policy and industry; investigating the underlying performance factors by factor analysis; and calculating the indicator weighting by entropy method. Additionally, the potential applications of the evaluation system in industry and its associated limitations are also discussed.