4.4.4.5 Digital technologies and improve options: Smart homes

In smart homes, information and communication technologies (ICTs) are distributed throughout rooms, devices and systems (lighting, heating, energy management); they relay information to users and feed back users’ or automated commands to manage the domestic environment (Wilson et al., 2020). Smart homes and smart devices play an important role in demand-side mitigation options: they are the end-use node of the smart energy system that allows consumers to improve the use of energy as well as utilities to respond to real-time flows of information on energy demand fed back by smart metres from millions of homes (Hargreaves and Wilson, 2017; Baydia et al., 2021). Thanks to digital devices and technologies, measures aimed at influencing habits through information provision and feedback on energy consumption can in theory result in substantial household energy savings (Jensen et al., 2016; Malmodin and Coroama, 2016; Nilsson et al., 2018). Notwithstanding this high potential, demonstrated energy savings from the limited number of studies on this topic appears to be relatively small but significant (BIT, 2017, Khanna et al., 2022). In the UK, for instance, data from a large-scale trial of smart metres and in-home displays in the UK demonstrated around three per cent energy reductions on average (AECOM, 2011). Potential savings (or ‘shaving’) during peak times can be more pronounced (Pratt and Erickson, 2020), particularly if linked in-home displays communicating usage and cost information to end-users enable utilities to charge for electricity at its marginal cost, providing a price signal to shift or curtail demand when supply is expensive or in short supply (Srivastava et al., 2018). Yet, households’ appetite or capacity for reducing energy bills in response to information feedback and price incentives appears limited, and interest in information and price signals rapidly wears off and is subject to rebound effects that offset demand reductions (Azarova et al., 2020).

Embedding digital technologies and devices in homes turns them from ‘passive’ (i.e. non-responsive to network needs) end-user nodes in hub-to-spoke energy networks to ‘active’ (responsive, flexible and integrated) nodes in distributed energy networks. This switch supports the achievement of PTPs in the energy system, as it integrates significantly more renewable energy and faces increased challenges due to widespread electrification of all sectors and activities. This shift is enabled by digitalisation in the domestic environment, with emerging potential for AI applications to help accelerate positive trends (towards informed energy management without required user interventions, and control over distributed end-use, storage and generation resources throughout the building stock).