A step closer towards active and flexible consumers: enhancing involvement through energy consumption feedback

Abstract

The level of consumer awareness and comprehension, during a period of abundant energy services, has a crucial role in their initial adoption and later engagement with the services. Digital energy platforms bring the ≫intangible electricity≪ closer to people’s daily lives and encourage new ways of thinking about and consuming energy. Energy feedback connects consumer’s consumption to their daily activities and provides insights. It enables them to learn about the consumption, learn how to reduce or optimise it and later, learn how to be flexible when needed. Besides investigating how familiar are the Slovenian households with their own consumption and energy related behaviour, the goal of this paper is also to investigate their preferences in visualizing their electricity consumption. The consumption estimation was validated on real case study using data from 642 Slovenian households. Results show that consumers that use electricity for space and water heating, underestimated their consumption up to 22.5%. A categorization of households based on their water and space heating systems is also presented.

Keywords

• household consumption
• flexibility
• QoL
• digital energy platforms
• energy feedback
• mock-up