January 31, 2024
The ReFlex Guidebook for the replication of use-cases tackling the flexibility challenge in smart energy systems is based on the ReFlex project, which aimed to develop a replicability guideline for the deployment of technologically feasible, market-based and user-friendly solutions for smart grids with a high level of flexibility. The focus was put on grids with an expectedly high level of renewable energy production which is effectively and efficiently used locally through mixes of measures from voltage regulation, demand response, energy management and storage. in eight demo sites in Austria (AT), Germany (DE), Sweden (SE) and Switzerland (CH). Four of them – Salzburg-Köstendorf (AT), Island of Gotland (SE) and Malmö-Hyllie (SE), Lausanne-Rolle (CH) – involved demo sites situated in larger areas with a distribution system operator (DSO) as the main project partner. The other four of them – Biel-Benken (CH), Güssing (AT), Hartberg (AT) and Wüstenrot (DE) – are situated in smaller areas with less than 15,000 inhabitants involving private and public owned energy utilities, which did not have to unbundle grid operation from energy supply.
April 5, 2019
For shaping and adapting policy agendas and institutional change towards Smart Grids, it is of utmost importance to understand how discourses develop in the fast-changing reality of energy transition. This policy brief provides evidence about the smart grid related topics, which create most attention by actor groups and the public. The analysis is based on systematically observed global communication at the online social media platform, Twitter with with a dataset of more than 70 thousand messages between December 2015 and April 2018, which all include the hashtag #smartgrid and/or #smartgrids.
November 18, 2017
Today, flexibility in energy end-use, particularly by households, is not sufficiently stimulated in many countries. Hence system-level benefits such as reduced electricity bills, better integration of renewable electricity generation and lowering of grid costs, are not realized.
Therefore, a widespread adoption of active demand1 by households is needed to tilt the cost-benefit balance of the investment in advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) towards a net benefit for society.
Although a variety of interventions aimed at activating households have been piloted in smart grid projects, a consistent and integrated view on how to incentivize end users to change their behavior is still lacking. From an energy policy perspective, it is important to understand key enabling factors that contribute to active demand by households, in order to leverage them by targeted policy interventions. From a research and innovation policy perspective, social innovations and involving end users in the innovation process are important fostering factors to overcome the barriers in bringing smart grid technologies from technological readiness to system wide deployment. This policy brief therefore aims at highlighting key success factors for active household engagement in smart grids. Based on experiences from existing programs and projects, it has become clear that two phases for active end-user engagement need to be distinguished:
For each of the two phase’s, diverse success factors were identified, with the main conclusion that a more differentiated, phase-sensitive view is needed on how to encourage greater user engagement through policy measures.
As the aim of ISGAN is to facilitate global knowledge sharing, this policy brief intends to disseminate these finding on user-engagement to a broader audience of policy makers dealing with smart grid policy.
May 16, 2017
Dealing with smart grids transitions, three years of activity of Annex 7 make it evident that policy makers are having many important questions about the dynamics of institutional change which need new answers.
However, rather than being able to provide ready-made answers about the institutional and social dimensions of smart grids, much more can be said about what-we-don’t-know. We identified two main reasons why we do not know enough about smart grid transition.