Abstract
CrowdFlex is an innovation project aimed at exploring how domestic flexibility can be harnessed to support the management of the electricity grid. It involves social science trials to better understand consumer behaviour and how households respond to incentives to adjust their energy use. While previous services have explored domestic flexibility, CrowdFlex rigorously tests domestic flexibility through randomised controlled trials (RCTs), examining variables like incentive structures, notice periods, times of day, and event durations. This rigorous causal identification will help policymakers and other stakeholders to assess the role domestic flexibility can play in supporting the UK’s goal of achieving a net-zero energy system by 2030.
Building on the insights from CrowdFlex’s Summer trials, CrowdFlex will conduct Winter trials from September 2024 through April 2025. In two of the trials, a randomised controlled trial (RCT) methodology will continue to be employed to ensure rigorous evaluation of the outcomes, allowing for robust comparisons between different consumer groups and behaviours. The third will involve a matched control group and randomised treatment groups.
The rewards for participants over the trials will align with payments that could be obtained for the volume of response from stacking of demand turn-up and turn-down markets, services and related capacity payments. The exact reward structure will differ between trial groups to generate evidence on customers’ sensitivity to differing incentive levels and structures. The trial is designed to investigate domestic demand response performance and classify response by key flexibility characteristics. This includes both turn-up and turn-down events. The trial will also consider where specific customer archetypes are more likely than others to display key flexibility characteristics.
These trials are designed to provide behavioural insights and learnings for demand side response service providers, particularly in understanding how customers react to price signals and domestic flexibility. The data collected will also inform decision-making in the Control Room regarding grid management at various times of the day and across different seasons. This information will offer a deeper understanding of system challenges, such as peak demand periods, network constraints, and the potential of distributed domestic assets to provide effective balancing solutions.
The Winter Trials are designed to assess domestic demand response performance by testing both availability and utilisation payments. The study will categorise responses according to key flexibility characteristics, including both turn-up and turn-down events. The trial will also examine whether certain customer archetypes are more likely than others to demonstrate particular flexibility characteristics.
Different trial groups will be created to test:
* The impact of availability payments on availability and response performance
* The impact of utilisation price on response performance
* The impact of additional rewards, such as consistency rewards, on response performance
The Winter Trials will also continue to serve the purpose of collecting data on domestic demand and flexible response to further inform and improve Demand Side Response Service Providers (DSRSPs)’ and NESO’s domestic demand and flexibility models respectively.
Two types of price structures are to be tested in the winter trials:
* Utilisation payments – payments to households per kWh for flexibility (turn-down or turn-up compared to an industry-agreed calculation of the customer’s counterfactual consumption (their ‘baseline’)) during flexibility events.
* Availability payments – payments to households with Electric Vehicles (EVs) and home chargers that allow third parties to operate them.
OVO Energy will conduct a trial of each type, while Ohme will focus on an availability payments trial only.