Ringing endorsement for the active home
97% of people surveyed think the active home is of high (65%) or medium (32%) importance to the smart, flexible grid.
To further our customer research, we conducted a survey of industry visitors to our stand at this year’s European Utility Week in Amsterdam. In total 146 people completed the survey in a bid to win a model Tesla (for kids!) – Henrique from Portugal was the lucky winner!
Our belief is that the “active consumer” that both our government and Europe are envisaging is not someone who will interact with energy on a daily basis, but is someone who has bought into technology that does so on their behalf: the active home. We define an active home as one that interfaces with the grid on a real-time basis to dynamically manage its demand. Our version of an active home is our Hybrid Home™ which you can read about on our website. The purpose of our survey was to gauge our customers’ interest in this proposition.
71% of respondents plan to buy an EV as their next car
And this is where the problem lies: the increased electricity demand could overload the local distribution network (each EV is roughly equivalent to putting another home on the grid). In fact, the majority of this knowledgeable set of people thought that local “brown-outs” were either of high (11%) or medium (50%) possibility over the next 5 years.
93% now consider Residential Demand Management (RDM) to be of high (49%) or medium (44%) importance
This is a big change from what we have seen before. Research conducted by the Smart Energy Demand Coalition* only a year ago showed that the majority of their members were focusing on the I&C demand management market. Which brings us to the active home and the headline figures above.
