Project description
Context
The European Green Deal has set the goal of climate neutrality by 2050, with an intermediate 2030 target of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% and an EU-wide 42.5% target for renewable energy, while ensuring a just societal transition. In this context, flexible energy demand is crucial to facilitate energy system integration of high shares of renewable energy to match electricity demand with variable supply. Demand-side flexibility is the ability of consumers to adapt their consumption patterns to external signals or dynamics, such as electricity prices or the availability of renewable energy.
DNV estimates that in 2030 demand-side flexibility in Europe could save 5% or €4.6 billion in electricity generation costs, reduce renewable energy curtailment to 15.5 TWh or 61% less, save 37.5 Mt CO2 emissions, and reduce equired distribution grid investments by EUR11.1-19.1 billion annually across the EU.[1] Yet barriers remain to the demand-side flexibility of end-consumers and gaps exist in our understanding of consumer behaviour, the potential, and impacts of demand-side flexibility in ensuring a just transition to a sustainable, reliable, and affordable energy system for all Europeans. Realising increased end-consumer flexibility in future decarbonized energy systems and markets requires experts with insights from behavioural sciences, psychology, sociology, marketing, economics, engineering and technology, to capture system and individual changes, as well as the resulting household and societal impacts.[2] This research project aims to fill this dearth of knowledge by integrating knowledge of engineering (e.g., mechanical and electrical engineering) and social sciences (economics, sociology, and anthropology) in a doctoral programme.
The aim of the Consumer Energy Demand Flexibility in Electricity Use (CoDeF) project is thus twofold:
1) To train 15 Doctoral Candidates to be world class researchers in end-consumer flexibility in decarbonized energy systems and markets through a consortium of leading research institutions in Europe. To our knowledge, there is currently no other training programme in Europe with a focus on this important issue.
2) To fill a gap in knowledge by providing a more cohesive insight into the social, economic, technological, and institutional conditions that facilitate the adoption, implementation, and application of demand-side flexibility.
[1] DNV (2022) ‘Demand-Side Flexibility in the EU: Quantification of benefits in 2030,’ Tech. Report, Brussels, Belgium.
[2] Schuitema, G., et al. (2017) The Consumer's Role in Flexible Energy Systems: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Changing Consumers' Behavior, IEEE Power and Energy Magazine, 15(1).
Project objectives
CoDeF’s scientific ambition is specified in three research objectives, implemented in dedicated work-packages (WP) as illustrated in the figure below, focusing on consumer behaviour, enabling frameworks, and impact assessment:
Research objective (RO1): To incentivise consumer flexibility through signals, behavioural interventions, new time-of-use energy contracts, smart device management, and the redesign of electricity markets (WP2, DC 1-4).
(RO2): To enable flexible consumer demand through the development of control algorithms and smart grids, smart devices, trust in society, electricity market structure, and regulatory frameworks (WP3, DC 5-8).
(RO3): To assess the impact of consumer flexibility on the energy system (WP4, DC 9-15).
CoDeF’s scientific objectives reflect the complexity of implementing more flexible consumer energy demand, which requires technical, institutional, social, and economic research across scales ranging from the individual to the entire energy system. Under each research objective, tasks are carried out with different disciplinary perspectives to support a successful societal transition to net-zero energy, whilst also building the resilience of the clean energy system. This interdisciplinary background provides fertile ground for a world-class training program, ensuring the DCs become innovative and expert researchers with a combination of strong research skills and key transferable competences to address the energy transition’s challenges, with detailed insight into the social, economic, technological, and regulatory conditions facilitating the adoption and implementation of demand-side flexibility. Section 1.1.2 focuses on the research objectives, the training program will be discussed in Section 1.3.
Each work package is broken down into four tasks, each covered by at least one doctoral research project. The total number of research projects is 15; 13 are funded under the MSCA action and 2 by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).
Arrangement of CoDeF Work Packages: CoDeF’s three research objectives are executed in three dedicated WPs (WP2-4), WP1 (project management), WP5 (training) and WP6 (dissemination).
To the best of our knowledge, there has never been a training programme on the topic of consumer energy flexibility. The international, interdisciplinary, and intersectoral nature of the research team with cutting-edge research infrastructures places it in a unique position to train researchers from different academic disciplines in a framework of innovative research highly relevant to current and future societal challenges.
Overview of PhD projects
