Results from the £28.3 million project, published today, show that demand-side response contracts – which reward business consumers for reducing electricity consumption or generating electricity locally when required – could postpone multi-million-pound network investments and keep customers’ energy bills down.
Customers in London could be saved £12m on the cost of delivering electricity over the next eight years through voluntary reductions in consumption at busy times on the network.
Wind-twinning tariffs were found to be an effective way of driving down costs by encouraging customers to adapt their energy use to local and national wind energy production. This was shown to reduce average peak demand on the network by up to 8 per cent, with 91 per cent of participants claiming to have saved money and wanting to see the tariffs rolled out.
An electric vehicle (EV) survey proved that an electric vehicle charging system could be more manageable than originally feared. Only six of the 41 EV drivers surveyed started charging their car immediately after their commute, even when their battery was half to three-quarters full.
However, the impact of charging vehicles at home on a mass scale remains substantial for electricity network operators – around 0.3kW per household.
Researchers also carried out a smart meter trial which revealed stark differences in winter energy use between high income families, peaking at 1.78kW, compared with single-occupancy low income groups, peaking at 0.54kW.
Home appliance survey showed that switching to more efficient appliances could save up to 10TWh in household electricity consumption by 2020.
Researchers also looked at systems monitoring the impact of green electricity exported to the London network and found the active network management approach would allow up to a third more energy plants to export power to urban networks.
Martin Wilcox, head of future networks at UK Power Networks suggests that intelligent systems “will be essential” in monitoring, controlling and balancing extra pressures on our networks “without human intervention”.
The aim of Low Carbon London was to test these new smart grid techniques on the electricity networks with thousands of Londoners to support the mounting uptake of low-carbon technologies.
Mr Wilcox said the findings of Low Carbon London will help “tackle the energy trilemma to deliver low-carbon, affordable, secure power supplies”.