Smart energy innovations must appeal to both landlords and tenants if vulnerable people are to benefit from the net-zero transition, a government-commissioned report has argued.
Project InvoLVe is part of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’s (BEIS) £505 million Energy Innovation Programme.
It aims to identify how future innovation could help vulnerable consumers benefit from and participate in a smart energy system.
BEIS commissioned Energy Systems Catapult to undertake the first phase of work and a report highlights the key findings.
It found that, at present, vulnerable consumers are not fully involved in many innovation projects and that this could create a future market in which they are unable to fully participate.
One of the report’s key recommendations was to increase access for tenants to smart energy products and services.
The report found no offers currently available to private renters that they would be able and willing to access but innovation could develop products and services that appeal to both landlords and vulnerable, low-income tenants.
“One example could be a level of service for heating that safeguards the property from damp and mould and that provides the residents with an adequate level of warmth at a lower cost,” the report suggested.
Furthermore, it found, vulnerable consumers may be at greater risk of being harmed if they do take part in innovation that fails to meet their needs. This could affect private renters where their landlord has chosen their product or service they have to use.
Additionally, the report calls for the sector to provide affordable payment options for low income consumers and enable those with energy-related health conditions to benefit from smart products and services.
Further key findings
The report found that the majority of existing innovation projects with vulnerable consumers have focused more on accessing and using products and less on how these consumers could purchase or pay for them.
Stakeholders also proposed a range of factors that could be obstacles for vulnerable consumers’ ability and willingness to participate in the future, but very few of these have been explicitly investigated in existing innovation projects.
Obstacles highlighted include the fact tenants may not have permission to make changes to their home or they cannot change their current energy supplier because of debt. Obstacles could also include low-digital skills which hamper accessibility.
Recent innovation projects have sought to ensure vulnerable consumers participate in them by removing the obstacles completely. This however does not demonstrate how the issues could be overcome in a future smart energy market.
As an example, innovation that provides free technology or only works with households which already have that technology does not learn how to overcome obstacles low-income consumers have in purchasing smart energy products and services in the future.
Additionally the report highlighted how most of the energy innovation projects with vulnerable consumers reviewed did not follow steps considered by some to be best practice innovation processes as used in other sectors.
This involves working with consumers to understand the problem space (discovery), co-creating solutions with them (alpha) and trialling at increasing scale (beta), before going live.
Future innovation, it said, would maximise its potential by taking a “human-centred design approach” involving designing products and services that addressed consumers’ needs and solved their problems.