Periodic Reporting for period 1 - WHY (Climbing the causality ladder to understand and project the energy demand of the residential sector)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2020-09-01 do 2022-02-28
Energy system models (ESMs) are a set of mathematical equations that describe the energy system. These models are used by energy experts to describe the long-term impacts of different scenarios that introduce changes in the energy systems. While ESMs have yielded useful results on modelling the energy supply, current ESM present a lack of accuracy in simulating the residential sector. The primary reason for these inaccuracies are the large diversity of dwellings that produces a myriad spectrum of consumption patterns.
To address this issue, the EU-funded WHY project will develop a causal model to quantitatively analyse people’s everyday decisions regarding energy consumption and their reactions to interventions such as change in tariff, new taxes, different kinds of incentives, nudges, etc. This will result in innovative methodologies for short- and long-term load forecasting which will be benchmarked in five different use cases ranging from microgrid size to international contexts.
In summary, the project seeks to improve a) the quality of leading ESM, b) the operation and planning of the energy distribution system and c) the assessment of electrical energy consumption trends on households while fostering the consideration of user behaviour in the modelling community, disseminate the outcomes to relevant stakeholders and citizens.
To address this issue, the EU-funded WHY project will develop a causal model to quantitatively analyse people’s everyday decisions regarding energy consumption and their reactions to interventions such as change in tariff, new taxes, different kinds of incentives, nudges, etc. This will result in innovative methodologies for short- and long-term load forecasting which will be benchmarked in five different use cases ranging from microgrid size to international contexts.
In summary, the project seeks to improve a) the quality of leading ESM, b) the operation and planning of the energy distribution system and c) the assessment of electrical energy consumption trends on households while fostering the consideration of user behaviour in the modelling community, disseminate the outcomes to relevant stakeholders and citizens.
The project has been continuously working towards these objectives. So far, these are the tasks performed to fulfil them:
* The partners have carried out a thoughtfully co-creation process involving more than 20 stakeholders. As a result a set of technical and non technical requirements that the solutions has to fulfil to be useful has been created. Finally, to address these requirements, the partners of the consortium have created a preliminary model architecture. As part of this co-creation process, partners have also defined the 5 use cases including the scenarios to assess, the interventions to consider and the modifications that are needed to include in the model.
* An innovative methodology to cluster households depending on their yearly electrical load consumption was created. The task has been used to assess more than 50 000 time series taken from smart metres from 12 western countries. As a result, the 40 typical yearly energy consumption patterns were found.
* A interdisciplinary and intersectoral panel of experts was assembled to create a taxonomy of determinants that influence the behaviour of people towards money or time invested in four different aspects of the energy transition: use of energy efficiency measures at building, participate in flexibility market, the new mobility and the new sharing economy. Nearly 1000 different answers were recorded and with the help of the Social Cognitive Theory a taxonomy with the 36 most relevant determinants was created. Finally, the determinants were sorted following the different “stages of change” of the Transtheoretical Model to complete 7 Causal Threads explaining the psychological reasons for participating in the energy transition.
* Creation of a conversational agent to perform just-in-time surveys that can be used in role playing games to retrieve better statistical information.
* Definition and carrying on a randomised control trial to assess the impact that a change of a tariff in conjunction with different information campaigns could have on the time of use of the energy.
* Implementation of different models of different components (such as Combined Heat and Power system, Energy Management Systems, Energy Storage Systems, Electric Vehicles or Power2x solutions) related to the energy transition on the HiSim simulation model.
* Finally, all of the previous results are being integrated on leading ESMs (PRIMES, PROMETHEUS and TIAM-ECN) to enhance the representation of user behaviour and decision making processes in large-scale Energy System Models at the EU level.
* The partners have carried out a thoughtfully co-creation process involving more than 20 stakeholders. As a result a set of technical and non technical requirements that the solutions has to fulfil to be useful has been created. Finally, to address these requirements, the partners of the consortium have created a preliminary model architecture. As part of this co-creation process, partners have also defined the 5 use cases including the scenarios to assess, the interventions to consider and the modifications that are needed to include in the model.
* An innovative methodology to cluster households depending on their yearly electrical load consumption was created. The task has been used to assess more than 50 000 time series taken from smart metres from 12 western countries. As a result, the 40 typical yearly energy consumption patterns were found.
* A interdisciplinary and intersectoral panel of experts was assembled to create a taxonomy of determinants that influence the behaviour of people towards money or time invested in four different aspects of the energy transition: use of energy efficiency measures at building, participate in flexibility market, the new mobility and the new sharing economy. Nearly 1000 different answers were recorded and with the help of the Social Cognitive Theory a taxonomy with the 36 most relevant determinants was created. Finally, the determinants were sorted following the different “stages of change” of the Transtheoretical Model to complete 7 Causal Threads explaining the psychological reasons for participating in the energy transition.
* Creation of a conversational agent to perform just-in-time surveys that can be used in role playing games to retrieve better statistical information.
* Definition and carrying on a randomised control trial to assess the impact that a change of a tariff in conjunction with different information campaigns could have on the time of use of the energy.
* Implementation of different models of different components (such as Combined Heat and Power system, Energy Management Systems, Energy Storage Systems, Electric Vehicles or Power2x solutions) related to the energy transition on the HiSim simulation model.
* Finally, all of the previous results are being integrated on leading ESMs (PRIMES, PROMETHEUS and TIAM-ECN) to enhance the representation of user behaviour and decision making processes in large-scale Energy System Models at the EU level.
Finally, the project is already achieving some progress beyond the state of the art in several fronts. First, the methodology defined to cluster smart metre data is able to assess the weekly and yearly seasonalities of the behaviours when so far only the daily seasonality patterns was assessed. This improvement in the methodology allowed us to assess the typical differences between European households and as well as to define innovative methods to assess the impact in the population of the recent lockdowns due to the COVID crisis. Preliminary results have been presented so far on these points but more comprehensive results will be produced in the next month. Several stakeholders could exploit this result. On the one hand, it could lead to improved building codes and other standards. Moreover, engineers could use these typical load profiles to create more realistics energy consumption simulations when sizing, defining the control strategies or the business model of different infrastructures. Finally, it could lead to improved forecasting which will have a direct impact on the management of energy cooperatives / communities.
Moreover, while several psychological models explaining the reasons for investing in the energy transition have been produced in the past, all of them cover only one aspect and have assumed that all persons behave similarly. This is one of the first times that both issues are being tackled at the same time. Moreover, these results could have a large impact on the definition of policy interventions to foster the energy transition as they will allow designing tailored interventions to overcome barriers and foster drivers considering the heterogeneity of the population.
Finally, when the WHY toolkit is completed, solutions to the five use cases could be developed. By using these solutions, very different advances over the state of the art are planned to be carried out:
New sizing and controlling algorithm will be used in the Gniebing use case to optimise the answer of a microgrid towards blackouts.
An assessment of the real technical, economic and social impact that time of use tariffs have. This could lead to a better definition of tariff schemes for Energy Cooperatives, DSOs or regulators.
Tools to ease the definition, creation and management of energy communities.
Integrate different aspects of the energy transition in ESM and simulation models to allow more holistics projections of the actual and future residential behaviour.
In summary, these improvements would lead to an improved evidence-based policy-making on the energy challenges ahead (climate crisis, energy sovereignty and decarbonization of the economy).
Moreover, while several psychological models explaining the reasons for investing in the energy transition have been produced in the past, all of them cover only one aspect and have assumed that all persons behave similarly. This is one of the first times that both issues are being tackled at the same time. Moreover, these results could have a large impact on the definition of policy interventions to foster the energy transition as they will allow designing tailored interventions to overcome barriers and foster drivers considering the heterogeneity of the population.
Finally, when the WHY toolkit is completed, solutions to the five use cases could be developed. By using these solutions, very different advances over the state of the art are planned to be carried out:
New sizing and controlling algorithm will be used in the Gniebing use case to optimise the answer of a microgrid towards blackouts.
An assessment of the real technical, economic and social impact that time of use tariffs have. This could lead to a better definition of tariff schemes for Energy Cooperatives, DSOs or regulators.
Tools to ease the definition, creation and management of energy communities.
Integrate different aspects of the energy transition in ESM and simulation models to allow more holistics projections of the actual and future residential behaviour.
In summary, these improvements would lead to an improved evidence-based policy-making on the energy challenges ahead (climate crisis, energy sovereignty and decarbonization of the economy).