DR. BEAR – Users involvement for a better management of electricity demand

The main goal of DR.BEAR project was to develop a Business Model to harness the potential flexibility coming from load shifting at household level, designing an appropriate customer engagement strategy and incentive scheme to involve them in such programs. According to the developed methodology, after a first stage of user-experience design, supported by a questionnaire (developed on purpose) to segment customers, the initial customer engagement phase includes a wide service offering, such as visualization of detailed energy consumption and advices to achieve bill savings, so to increase the awareness of end-users in the energy field while making them ready to take action. The real Demand Response is implemented only in the last stage, asking customers to change their consumption habits, not only for a personal benefit, as before, but according to the need of the grid. Most of the revenues for utilities and aggregators will come from selling this flexibility as a service on the electricity market. As the financial incentive for each household is likely to be limited, different leverages have been identified such as an incentive scheme based on the collection of virtual coins: starting already from the engagement phase, these can be earned for instance by reducing personal energy consumption, taking part in quiz and training, or using a number of services, related to the smart city strategy such as EV car sharing, e-bike sharing and public transport. Once the DR program is actually implemented in the last step, shifting electricity consumption according to the signal received will represent another source of virtual earnings.