The Idea

In Ofgem’s Electricity Capacity Assessment Report, they stated that electricity margins could tighten in 2015-16 to between around 2% to 5% and the generation industry must get a grip on the problem through greater investment and other initiatives.

The Dynamic Demand Challenge Prize was designed and delivered by Nesta’s Centre for Challenge Prizes in partnership with the National Physical Laboratory’s Centre for Carbon Measurement (NPL) to stimulate demand side response solutions for households and small businesses.

The Challenge Statement

Create a new product, technology or service that utilised data to significantly improve the ability of households or small businesses to demonstrate measurable reduction in carbon emissions by shifting energy demand to off peak times or towards excess renewable generation.

What happened?

Five finalists were selected at a 36 hour Hackathon in October 2013 and spent 8 months developing their prototypes.

DemandShaper: A smart heating control product for electrically-heated homes that performs scheduled demand shifts reducing costs for homeowners and allowing electricity suppliers to better manage demand.

Kudos Energy: Enables the group of households around each substation to earn rewards for their local community by manually flattening and balancing demand.

PowerVault: A self-install electricity storage system for households with solar panels and off-peak tariffs, enabling customers to use green, inexpensive power when they actually need it, saving 10-15 per cent of electricity bills, cutting electricity peaks and carbon emissions.

thEnergy: A system using domestic heat pumps and thermal accumulators to provide heat when required, but independent from electricity consumption. This allows users to manage the grid side as an energy service company.

UPSide: A cloud-based service that combines energy storage capacity in different devices into a “virtual energy store” that can be used by the grid to balance supply and demand.

What did we learn?

Read more about the challenge prize process and profiles of the finalists and winner in our Dynamic Demand Challenge Prize publication.