Abstract

The energy transition towards renewable energy sources and distributed generation is essential to mitigate climate change. However, the renewable energy sources are intermittent in nature, and therefore it may cause network congestion during peak consumption in future. Therefore, demand side energy flexibility is inevitable in complement to the supply side management and energy storage. The residential sector is the largest energy consumer and is therefore essential to implement demand-side energy flexibility. In addition to the existing approaches of energy flexibility, we present in this thesis a non-monetary “indirect” flexibility through the implementation of a behavioral science experiment with 175 French households. The set of nudges used in this experiment does not oblige the participating households to implement energy flexibility for either monetary gain or loss aversion. Nudge alerts are generated by predictive algorithms and sent by SMS to a group of households with the aim of carrying out either load shifting or load shedding. The nudge alerts are complemented with the suggestions about using (or not using) committed appliances to implement energy flexibility. After each alert, the group receives graphical feedback in which the load curve measured by LINKY smart meter is superposed by a theoretical reference curve specific to each household. In comparison to a control group, we can quantify the impact of these nudge signals on the energy consumption of the treated group. Finally, an energy disaggregation algorithm is presented that will allow us to detect the equipment used during the flexibility and thus will do an analysis of the commitment of households to look for potential appliances for energy flexibility.

Muhammad Salman Shahid. Nudging electricity consumption in households : A case study of french residential sector. Electric power. Université Grenoble Alpes 2022. English. ⟨NNT : 2022GRALT031⟩. ⟨tel-03766410⟩
You can access the full paper here.