The role of gender, age, and income in demand-side management acceptance: A literature review

Review article, 2025

Demand-side management (DSM) programs aiming to both reduce and render household consumption more flexible are becoming increasingly essential due to ongoing energy crises and the growing integration of renewable energy into energy production. The active involvement of households and energy users is crucial to fully unlock the potential of DSM programs. As this paper demonstrates, despite more than thirty years of feminist scholarly work focusing on the home as an important site of the production of gender inequality, few of these insights have been taken into account by DSM designers. Additionally, we note a broader pattern concerning gaps in knowledge regarding the diverse perspectives of energy users and their domestic contexts, all of which create obstacles to successful rollout and scalability. This paper uses the concepts of the social license to automate and intersectionality to analyze the existing literature on DSM programs. We find that three primary barriers in household DSM programs have been addressed: 1) there is an unresolved tension between DSM technology being perceived as a masculine domain and the home as a feminine domain; 2) low-income households face challenges in accessing the technology needed to enable both flexibility and savings; and 3) disparities in opportunities for youth and the elderly to participate in DSM programs are insufficiently considered. Based on these findings we argue that user diversity—not only conceived of as separate identity category variables but also as implicating overlapping and possible mutually reinforcing marginalizations– is needed to form a starting point in DSM program design for fair and scalable solutions.