Reliability evaluation is of crucial importance for the planning and operation of smart gird. Traditional reliability evaluation methods mainly concern on analyzing electricity outages observed from the system side, regardless of whether end consumers are in need of electricity during outage events. Thus, it may not truly reflect the actual impacts of outages on the reliability level suffered from the power consumer. To overcome this deficiency, a consumer-aware reliability evaluation method is proposed in this paper. According to the method, the reliability level sensed by consumers is effectively assessed with respect to outage time and their load curves. New metrics for assessing consumer-aware reliability are proposed to better reflect the impact of outage suffered from user side. A method to quantitatively assess reliability compensation for outage is proposed. A typical smart grid system is used as case study to illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed metrics and method.