
Want to find out more or get involved?
If you’d like to find out more about this trial, please drop us an email at heat-flex@centrefornetzero.org
What phase is the research currently in?
At the end of last year, we completed the pre-pilot phase and conducted interviews with heat pump owners ahead of the pilot. We used knowledge gathered during these interviews to influence the details of the design of the pilot, which will then inform the design of the trials.
We’ve installed the smart thermostats required to intervene in household heating for those who’ve agreed to participate in the pilot – which began in January 2023 and is running during the winter months. In this phase, we’re analysing the datasets we receive and using key learnings to make adjustments to the full trial design.
In November 2023, our aim is to begin phases one and two of the full HeatFlex UK trial. We’ll be implementing learnings from the pilot to scale up this field experiment to hundreds of consumers – or possibly thousands. We will be using a scheduled plan to harness as much flexibility as possible during times when energy demand is very high over this period.
By scaling up the number of households who participate in this trial, we can more accurately define the parameters of heating comfort zones that can be applied to a diversity of households. We can better understand people’s level of trust in automation; and we can gather more insights about the circumstances in which people want to participate in flexibility events.
By combining these insights, we hope that this research is one step on the journey to outputting an empirical metric that could be used to inform customers, aggregators and the grid about the opportunities to avoid home heating during peak time periods, thereby enabling a greener, flexible future energy system.