Designing and experimenting nudge signals to act on the energy signature of households for implementing indirect energy flexibility

Abstract

To maintain energy balance in the grid, energy flexibility is entailed at consumer side. Generally, the participants of demand response experiments are offered economic incentive with historic or normative feedback on their energy consumption. In this article, we present an energy flexibility experiment concerning residential sector, which is based on nudge signals with indirect feedback and no monetary incentive. The results show that nudge signal can serve as an important tool to implement energy flexibility without hindering consumer's comfort. This study is effective to implement energy flexibility on local energy communities while offering no direct economic incentive. Key Innovations Load curtailment and load shifting alerts are conceived for the residential buildings based on the day ahead forecasted condition of national grid.  Nudge cocktail (a collection of nudge signals) is devised for sending alerts to the participants. The participants may respond to each alert according to their degree of flexibility without loss of comfort.  Reference load curve is formulated for each participant. An image of reference load curve superposed on measured load curve is sent to the subjects as indirect feedback. Practical ImplicationsThe study is significant for energy flexibility of residential sector to mitigate forecasted day ahead energy imbalance in the grid. The load shifting alerts are based on the historic consumption of same sector, which enables the participant to implement energy flexibility according to their degree of flexibility without any loss of comfort.

Realistic Nudging through ICT Pipelines to Help Improve Energy Self-Consumption for Management in Energy Communities

“…In that regard, emails and internet platforms possess huge scalability potential. In our work, our nudges, composed of green periods (see Section 3), are similar to those defined in Salman Shadid et al [19].…”

“…Nudging strategies aiming at helping people improve the way they consume energy has been recognised as an interesting tool for energy consumption management: see, for instance, the review Karlin et al [18]. Experiments have been conducted as well on private households [19,20] and on working premises [21]. Analysis of the results of the large-scale OPOWER study showed nudging to be efficient in helping reduce consumption [22].…”

“…We first define the notion of nudge we use, before explicating the model of human behaviour we assume, upon the reception of a nudge. The concept of green period is inspired from Salman Shadid et al [19].…”