The Human’s Comfort Mystery—Supporting Energy Transition with Light-Color Dimmable Room Lighting

Abstract

The constant increase of intermittent renewable energies in the electricity grid complicates balancing supply and demand. Thus, research focuses on solutions in demand-side management using energy flexibility to resolve this problem. However, the interface between demand-side management and human behavior is often insufficiently addressed, although further potential could be leveraged here. This paper elaborates on the effect of light color on humans’ temperature and comfort perception in connection to energy flexibility. Researchers have found that people perceive blue light as colder and red light as warmer. To this end, we evaluate the effect of light color in a case study for a German industrial facility assuming sector-coupled electric heating. We simulate the entire heating period from October to April in an hourly granularity, using the well-established real options analysis and binomial trees as a decision support system to heuristically minimize energy expenditures by utilizing deferral options when energy prices are high. Our results show a 12.5% reduction in heating costs for sector-coupled electric heating, which extrapolated leads to CO2-eq emission savings of over 34,000 tons per year for the entire German industry, thereby supporting the energy transition.