This project is investigating the potential for community governance to increase the active management of domestic electricity demand.
It will make use of smart technologies for metering, data visualisation, and automatic switching of appliances to control electricity demand in homes.
The protocols used will be developed and managed by a community social enterprise, accountable to participating members. Energy efficient behaviour will be incentivised financially through payments from the National Grid for 'balancing services' which help balance the electricity grid at peak times.
This will be a community managed incentive, and a variety of methods for supporting collaborative energy efficient behaviour, such as transparent community monitoring, individual incentive payments from the community, and other benefits such as energy cost savings and energy efficiency will also be tested. An integrated approach will be taken to the neighbourhood scale electricity system, including miocrogeneration such as solar PV and micro wind, storage such as electric vehicle batteries, and non time sensitive appliances such as fridges and freezers, immersion heaters, fuel cells and heat pumps.