Enabling flexible electricity demand through event based incentives and gamification

Abstract:
A key factor for a successful energy transition is implementation of load flexibility to accommodate higher amounts of renewable energy sources. To motivate load flexibility we propose using a gamification based approach for household customers. In this paper, we analyze how to set incentives to trigger demand flexibility in times of high renewable energy generation and quantify the theoretical flexibility potential, which depends on the presence in the households. The results show that about 3 % of the annual energy can be shifted into times of high feed-in from renewable energy sources by manual intervention at household level for the chosen reference case. The limiting factor is mainly the time coincidence of presence in households and production from renewable energy sources. This poses a barrier for the approach of providing flexibility through direct user interaction. The approach therefore does not replace, but complements the need for automated control of larger electric loads, such as heat pumps or electric vehicles, which are not part of the analysis at hand.