Innovative user experience design and customer engagement approaches for residential demand response programs

Abstract

The increasing share of intermittent sources is making it more difficult to guarantee a real-time balance between demand and supply on the electricity grid. To decrease the dependency from fossil fuel generation, a change in paradigm is required: from supply following demand whenever it occurs to demand following generation when it is available. Demand response (DR) programs enclose all practices that allow demand to take part in actively managing the grid. According to this perspective, the residential sector hides a huge still unexploited flexibility resource. Therefore, utilities and aggregators need to address weak customer engagement and a lack of regulation in order to employ innovative business models for harnessing residential DR programs potential. Within this paper, some of these challenges are investigated, with the view to improve the design of an appropriate engagement strategy and an incentive scheme to involve residential customers. The innovation consists in the development of a questionnaire as a tool to understand customers’ behavior and preferences, so as to consequently design customized solutions. Finally, a first-order approximation techno-economic analysis is conducted to contextualize the actual incentives for the single customer.