Energy Revolution Research Consortium- Plus - EnergyREV - User Influence Tools for Enabling Two-way Engagement with Smart Local Energy Systems

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

User participation in smart local energy systems is imperative for their successful deployment, as affirmed by the 'consumer pull' approach to energy innovation promoted by the Prospering from the energy revolution (PFER) programme. However, many users rarely engage in energy markets/ demand response for reasons including market heterogeneity and regulatory constraints, novelty, demand inelasticity and lack of understanding. Energy feedback initiatives tend to offer unidirectional forms of engagement that adopt an information-driven approach with a focus on analytics and dashboards, although users may wish for more interactive engagement, sometimes with a community dimension, and there is some evidence of its effectiveness. Communication and visualisation of local energy flows and interactions (of constituent vectors - electricity, heat and transport) can influence users if they move beyond one way flow of information with no power for negotiation, and instead enable users to understand themselves, their activities, resources and energy use in a more joined-up way; also to manage, directly or through delegation, their consumption, production and storage of energy, contributing to network and grid balancing at the same time as gaining value for themselves and their communities. The communication takes place most effectively through a combination of personal and technological interactions: person-person, person-technology, technology-technology. The action-oriented approach adopted in this Plus project is designed to address the need to extend and strengthen user participation in energy systems at local level, and deepen the impact of the Core WP4.1 by using longitudinal local energy data to co-create a suite of smart tools that are trialled using inclusive approaches in two contrasting demonstrator (urban/rural) case studies using distributed energy resources.