SERG’s Dr Ben Anderson recently gave an Otago Energy Research Centre seminar on the SAVE project results to date. He was also invited to give an interview to the University of Otago’s radio station, RadioOne 91FM (“Aotearoa’s southernmost student radio station!”).
Interview:
Seminar abstract:
“Whilst overall reduction of energy demand is receiving increasing policy attention in the United Kingdom, reductions targeted at specific times of day are also becoming crucial. This is largely driven by the need to reduce the effects of regular evening demand peaks of increasing magnitude on an ageing local distribution infrastructure; to reduce reliance on ‘high-carbon high-cost’ fuel sources during such demand peaks and to attempt to better match demand to localised, time-specific or intermittent low-carbon generation. This presentation will describe SAVE, a large scale randomised control trial approach to testing a range of interventions intended to reduce and/or shift electricity consumption out of the ‘peak’ 16:00-20:00 evening winter weekday periods. After describing the participant recruitment process and demonstrating the representative and thus generalisable nature of the resulting sample, the presentation will present preliminary results of the first trial period testing different forms of financial and non-financial incentives. It will conclude with a glimpse of ongoing work to use the results to model local area demand profiles which is being continued at the University of Otago in 2018-2019 under an EU funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship.”
Slides: