Consumer behind the meter (BTM) resilience as a socio-technical service: report to the SIF discovery project: NPG/resilient customer response/SIFIESRR/Rd2_discovery

Abstract

The purpose of this report is to review current peer-reviewed empirical evidence and available case studies of the use of behind the meter (BTM) assets to provide local resilience services to understand how domestic customers might be incentivised to provide local BTM resilience services in the UK context. This focus on reviewing evidence of how such a service might work in practice reflects the importance of the socio-technical context to the provision, adoption and use of a new and potentially disruptive technical and social configuration. Understanding this socio-technical context will be crucial to the success of such a service because it will be enacted in moments of social and economic stress when ‘normal’ practices and understandings might need to be suspended. In this respect the report responds to previous work pointing out that a focus purely on technology, electrons, markets, carbon and techno-economic system simulations will be insufficient as guides to future service implementation and may well risk future failure.

Unfortunately, given the emerging nature and the technical immaturity of the concept this evidence base has proven extremely thin. Even a more generic focus on local energy markets suggests that the vast majority of studies focus on technical aspects, the implications for power network stability and on modelled consumer behaviour under a range of ‘rational actor’ models. As Dudjak et al (2021) note “Further research is therefore needed in the area of prosumers’ behaviour strategies to study their impact realistically”.

The report therefore starts by reviewing what is known about how residential consumers respond to and cope with power outages before reviewing the very few studies of stated preferences for sharing BTM assets. It then gleans insights from a range of empirical studies of ‘prosumption in action’– including peer-to-peer trading, self-consumption and transactive energy trading as well as prospective preference studies of future energy trading systems. Insights are also drawn from studies of direct load control, vehicle to grid, and energy sufficiency before moving on to a number of case studies. These include solar household systems which have long been considered crucial to energy resilience in the global south; (islanded) mini/micro-grids since although “electricity islands are forced to operate in a fully autarkic way, energy communities can adopt features of electricity islands by choice”; experiences of power outages during Hurricane Isaac and recent experiences of preserving (and sharing) household level electricity use via solar and storage systems in New Zealand during Cyclone Gabrielle in early 2023.

The report concludes with a summary of the themes and insights generated through these sections from the perspective of potential future local BTM asset-based resilience services.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Ben Anderson: orcid.org/0000-0003-2092-4406

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