  Due to the emergence of new technologies, the whole electricity system is
undergoing transformations on a scale and pace never observed before. The
decentralization of energy resources and the smart grid have forced utility
services to rethink their relationships with customers. Demand response (DR)
seeks to adjust the demand for power instead of adjusting the supply. However,
DR business models rely on customer participation and can only be effective
when large numbers of customers in close geographic vicinity, e.g., connected
to the same transformer, opt in. Here, we introduce a model for the dynamics of
service adoption on a two-layer multiplex network: the layer of social
interactions among customers and the power-grid layer connecting the
households. While the adoption process - based on peer-to-peer communication -
runs on the social layer, the time-dependent recovery rate of the nodes depends
on the states of their neighbors on the power-grid layer, making an infected
node surrounded by infectious ones less keen to recover. Numerical simulations
of the model on synthetic and real-world networks show that a strong local
influence of the customers' actions leads to a discontinuous transition where
either none or all the nodes in the network are infected, depending on the
infection rate and social pressure to adopt. We find that clusters of early
adopters act as points of high local pressure, helping maintaining adopters,
and facilitating the eventual adoption of all nodes. This suggests direct
marketing strategies on how to efficiently establish and maintain new
technologies such as DR schemes.
