
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?
Having completed the pilot phase, we are analysing the quantitative and qualitative data that we have gathered. This analysis should help us to assess how acceptable participants found the automation involved in each event and how much flexibility each household was able to provide. We intend to use the findings from the analysis to inform our design for the scaled up trial that we plan to conduct in the winter of 2023-24.
We’ll be implementing learnings from the pilot to scale up this field experiment to hundreds of consumers – or possibly thousands. The findings of these field experiments will then be used to create a scheduled plan to harness as much flexibility as possible during times when energy demand is very high.
By scaling up the number of households who participate in this trial, we can better understand what ‘good’ automation looks like, how we can engender trust in automated low carbon technologies, and what this means for the amount of flexibility we can rely upon these assets to unlock in the future.
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.