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.

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The energy transition is a multidisciplinary challenge that warrants solutions that are robust and sustainable. Energy flexibility, one of the key pillars of the energy transition, is an umbrella term that covers multiple innovative solutions implemented at all levels of the electric grid to ensure power quality standards, amongst other objectives. Low-tech, on the other hand, emphasizes designing, producing, and sustainably implementing solutions. Therefore, considering the multidisciplinary nature of energy transition and the existing energy flexibility solutions, the purpose of this research work is multilateral: first, it presents the concept of low-tech and its associated mechanisms; then, it addresses the misconceptions and similarities that low-tech might have with other innovation approaches; and finally, it provides an assessment of existing flexibility solutions using low-tech as a tool. The result of this assessment is presented qualitatively and indicates that indirect energy flexibility solutions rank higher on a low-tech scale relative to supply-side energy flexibility solutions and energy storage flexibility solutions.

For the days when energy flexibility is activated, the difference of reference load curve (RLC) and measured load curve (MLC) gives a measure of energy flexibility.