Over the last decade or so we have been on a journey to introduce that concept to regulators, industry bodies, retailers, suppliers and customers. Our strategy is, and has always been, to engage customers by first making energy visible and engaging; and we believe that doing this is the first step in helping householders to understand what they are consuming.
After visibility and engagement, we progressively introduce ways in which householders can control their consumption, for example how they can switch things on and off in a systematic way. The final stage is automation, so that it all happens in the background, using AI (Artificial Intelligence) to predict and then optimise household consumption patterns. Adapting appliances to pick the most cost effective times of the day to use electricity (and increasingly, to store it in batteries for later use), to most efficiently consume and store power generated from solar panels and ensure that electric cars, for example (more and more apparent on our streets today and expected to account for 25% of new car sales by 2025 and 40% by 2040), are ready to use when they are needed, balancing knowledge of when the car will next be in use by integrating with household diaries and charging in the most cost-effective way (Centre of Automotive Management, 2018).
Our early thinking has taken somewhat longer than we had anticipated to bed into peoples’ minds; and before we can hope to realise that automated future, there remains a long way to go with early engagement and critically, building consumer trust. But we believe that our perspective remains the right one and we intend to lead the energy discussion with a series of papers and forums, informed by experts and insights both from within and outside the sector, which in turn will help to shape some of the customer opportunities available to retailers and suppliers.
About the authors
This white paper was written by geo, the UK’s leading smart energy technology company. If you would like to explore the topics discussed in this white paper in more detail, please contact geo by phone on +44(0)1223 850 210 or by email at marketing@geotogether.com.
