Phil Grünewald
Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford
philipp.grunewald@eng.ox.ac.uk
The winter 2022/23 has seen exceptional energy prices coinciding with a general cost of living crisis. How have energy users responded?
Over the past eight years we have collected high resolution household electricity and gas readings alongside electronic activity diaries and socio-demographic survey information. These data help us to understand the vast diversity in energy use between different user groups and how they differ in their response to changes in price, incentives or information.
Over 400 households have taken part in this process and we contrast them with energy data from the Smart Energy Research Lab cohort of n=13,000.
The key lessons include that electricity demand is more flexible over the short term than the long term. Changes to wholesale prices only slowly affect household demand, whereas peak demand could reliably be reduced by over 23% for an hour or two on average, but with wide distributions within the cohort. The electronic activity diaries reveal that hot meal preparation is a strong predictor of high peak time demand, and also that households significantly and successfully reduce their hot meal preparation during demand response trials.
Gas demand, by contrast, was less responsive in general. Neither lockdown, nor price rises or targeted incentives resulted in significant changes to heating demand. Only one in six households achieved a 10% reduction, when asked to save on gas during a two hour period from 5pm to 7pm. New heating solutions, such as heat pumps and automation, promise to improve flexibility and we point towards ongoing and future work in this space.
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