Engaging households to avoid congestion works: mixing gamification, automation and trading

Last year we presented our first residential pilot, together with DSO Alliander in Amsterdam where we prevent local net congestion by incentivising residents in the same district to shift power consumption outside forecasted time windows of net congestion. In this presentation we are sharing the results: residents actually participate and change their behaviour.

In the initial step we took a gamification approach where everybody can participate, regardless of their personal situation. Now, with active involvement of Alliander we are extending the approach towards automation logic for charging, thermostats and home batteries. We will share the forecasting and optimisation methods we are using for combining automation with the original gamification.

The next challenge is to enable users to participate in additional markets at the same time without creating conflicts: local congestion, dynamic tariffs, energy sharing and even seasonal storage. With that in mind we started additional projects with the City of The Hague and DSO Stedin, as well as with the City of Arnhem and DSO Alliander. We are combining household participation in reducing net congestion with optimising shared assets such as district batteries and public charging. Jointly we started a collaboration with GOPACS (the Dutch congestion management portal) to enable the energy community of residents to trade, a first of it's kind. We will demonstrate the cases for Amsterdam, Arnhem, and The Hague.