Are building users prepared for energy flexible buildings?—A large-scale survey in the Netherlands

Abstract

h i g h l i g h t sAwareness of smart grids is the highest among respondents aged 20-29 years old. Willingness to use smart technologies and change energy behaviour are interdependent. Potential flexible building users were found to be 11% of the respondents. Building energy flexibility might play a crucial role in demand side management for integrating intermittent renewables into smart grids. The potential of building energy flexibility depends not only on the physical characteristics of a building but also on occupant behaviour in the building. Building users will have to adopt smart technologies and to change their daily energy use behaviours or routines, if energy flexibility is to be achieved. The willingness of users to make changes will determine how much demand flexibility can be achieved in buildings and whether energy flexible buildings can be realized. This will have a considerable impact on the transition to smart grids. This study is thus to assess the perception of smart grids and energy flexible buildings by building users, and their readiness for them on a large scale. We attempted to identify the key characteristics of the ideal user of flexible buildings. A questionnaire was designed and administered as an online survey in the Netherlands. The questionnaire consisted of questions about the sociodemographic characteristics of the current users, house type, household composition, current energy use behaviour, willingness to use smart technologies, and willingness to change energy use behaviour. The survey was completed by 835 respondents, of which 785 (94%) were considered to have provided a genuine response. Our analysis showed that the concept of smart grids is an unfamiliar one, as more than 60% of the respondents had never heard of smart grids. However, unfamiliarity with smart grids increased with age, and half of the respondents aged 20-29 years old were aware of the concept. Monetary incentives were identified as the biggest motivating factor for adoption of smart grid technologies. It was also found that people would be most in favour of acquiring smart dishwashers (65% of the respondents) and refrigerator/freezers (60%). Statistical analysis shows that people who are willing to use smart technologies are also willing to change their behaviour, and can thus be categorised as potentially flexible building users. Given certain assumptions, 11% of the respondents were found to be potentially flexible building users. To encourage people to be prepared for energy flexible buildings, awareness of smart grids will have to be increased, and the adoption of smart technologies may have to be promoted by providing incentives such as financial rewards. a r t i c l e i n f o

Investigating UK consumers’ heterogeneous engagement in demand-side response

“…Dish-washing and laundry, in turn, are the two activities that respondents are more willing to shift; 45% would be willing to shift the timing of their dish-washing and 58% the timing of laundry. The high willingness to change dish-washing and laundry time is in line with the findings in previous studies (Carmichael et al 2014;Li et al 2017;Power System Engineering 2012;Smale et al 2017). In general, respondents tend to shift the end-use time to late night (20:01~0:00) rather than early morning (0:01~7:00) to avoid noises from the operation of appliances (Carmichael et al 2014;Friis and Haunstrup Christensen 2016).…”

“…4. The varying, age-dependent willingness-to-shift activities has also been confirmed by other studies (Li et al 2017;Xu et al 2018). did find that UK consumers older than 65 would be more likely to switch to smart TOU tariff, but as our study did not consider that age group, our findings do not contradict those of either.…”

“…morning, evening) and the specific end-use activity, such as heating and cloth-washing, was not examined in the study. Li et al (2017), in turn, explored, with the help of an online survey, users' willingness in the Netherlands to adopt smart appliances and to shift the use time of the appliances. Socio-demographic characteristics, dwelling characteristics, household energy use, familiarity with smart technologies and energy attitude were taken into account in a linear regression formulation, to identify the consumers' heterogeneous willingness to change their end-use behaviours.…”

“…Moreover, those few studies that did consider socio-demographic elements all focused on aggregate use of electricity alone and did not assess the willingness to adjust specific domestic end-use activities, such as cooking and heating, as a function of the socio-demographic indicators (Fell et al 2015;Xu et al 2018). As consumers' acceptance of DSR programmes could vary dramatically for different end-use activities (Carmichael et al 2014;Li et al 2017), the estimation of future benefits of DSR in system balancing based on aggregated engagement with DSR (Teng et al 2016) could be misleading. Moreover, the lack of understanding of consumer behaviour and the capacity to adjust end-use activity has also been suggested to be a significant barrier to the design and deployment of effective DSR programmes (Gyamfi et al 2013).…”

Prospects of Appliance-Level Load Monitoring in Off-the-Shelf Energy Monitors: A Technical Review

“…A smart meter also assists in remote billing and instant load feedback to the utility for load forecasting. As it is owned by the utility, the smart meter comes with inherent drawbacks related to data confidentiality and privacy [16][17][18]. On the contrary, an e-monitor is owned by the consumer and works independently alongside existing energy meters, without any direct effect on the billing.…”