WATTALYST · Modelling and Analysing Demand Response Systems

Demand Response [DR] programs along with the emergence of technology to support DR are known to offer a high potential for energy consumption reduction. However, the process of designing effective DR programs is not yet very well understood. Research related to demand response and demand side management has addressed a suite of issues including differential pricing, incentive schemes, consumption profiling, and eco-feedback. Despite these efforts, there is a lack of understanding of factors (such as weather, local events, consumer context,) that influence the demand side. Understanding these factors and appropriately integrated in the DR programs is crucial to the success of DR.<br/>WATTALYST (WATT anALYSis Technologies) will address this need by establishing correlations between electricity consumption (monitored on a fine-grained basis) and the factors that influence demand side participation. The insights gained will be presented to DR designers using a visual analytics framework that can help the designers, and possibly also policy makers, to design and implement effective DR solutions and configure related parameters when it comes to energy/DR information communication (visualization) and consumer incentives, including pricing models.<br/>WATTALYST focus is to:• Investigate demand response participation rates and how these rates vary based on external factors (weather, week-day, holidays etc), internal factors (private or professional context etc) and customer persons profile (age, position in organization/family etc).• Understand how consumers reduce demand, by identifying the loads (e.g. washing machines, electric vehicles) that can be shifted and those that cannot, and by identifying the loads that can be reduced (e.g. cooling, heating) and those that cannot.• Understand effective methods of conveying the DR signals to users. In particular, the research will focus on interface design, communication means (in-house displays, SMS messages) based on importance/priority and type of consumer/user profile.<br/>WATTALYST will advance the state-of-the-art on the above topics, both in research and by means of a set of experimental trials with consumers/users in three pilot sites. Final project results will be compiled as DR design recommendations".<br/>The type of new DR design knowledge that WATTALYST will generate, will target several major energy related environmental, human, societal and industrial challenges and objectives such as reduced energy consumption, improved environment impact, and an overall improved energy economy."