Abstract

The electricity system will go through massive changes in the coming years. Smart grids are becoming more popular. The phasing out of fossil fuels in electricity production in favour of renewable power sources will entail challenges. To handle these challenges, the Swedish Energy Markets Inspectorate (Ei) has identified demand side flexibility as a partial solution. Ei has presented new functionality demands on electricity meters, which aims at working for an increase of demand side flexibility. The aim of this report is to investigate how smart meters and the new functionality demands contribute in making the customers become more active, along with how customers’ demand side flexibility can increase. The findings from this report show that the new demands do not directly lead to more demand side flexibility. Instead they enable other actors to develop services that could lead to customers contributing with demand side flexibility. In the energy sector, it is assumed that customers need to see an economic benefit in order to contribute with flexibility. This report finds that this is not entirely the case. Customers can be motivated by other things, such as protecting the environment. Important factors for customers are that they experience the same comfort as before, along with simplicity. Therefore, automatic steering is the preferable option which might entail the need for economic subsidies since investing in automatic systems will be economically notable. Once a considerable amount of customers are contributing with demand side flexibility, social pressure might motivate remaining customers to do the same.