The £100,000 Dynamic Demand Challenge Prize was designed to stimulate new products, technologies or services using data to achieve reduced carbon emissions by shifting energy demand to off peak times or through excess renewable generation.
It was delivered by Challenge Works in partnership with the National Physical Laboratory’s Centre for Carbon Measurement (NPL) to stimulate demand side response solutions for households and small businesses.
Electricity generation accounts for around 30 per cent of UK CO2 emissions, with the primary source of UK electricity still predominantly fossil fuels. The UK’s electricity system is therefore under increasing pressure to keep up with the ever-growing electricity demand.
Pressure on and from governments to move towards a low-carbon economy adds complexity to this problem through increased use of decentralised renewable energy generation.
An important barrier to the use of renewable energy is that its intermittence means it may need to be matched with other non–renewable sources of energy that provide base load for power grids. Dynamic demand, or demand–side response (DSR) is the exchange of information between electronic devices, responding to signals from the grid directly or indirectly.
These products or technologies can help shift electricity consumption away from peak hours where electricity consumption is high, or enable greater usage of excess electricity generation from renewables, as well as help maximise the use of a smart infrastructure.
Five finalists were selected at a 36-hour Hackathon in October 2013 and spent 8 months developing their prototypes.
Sign up to our newsletter to be the first to know about future challenges.
Hestia powered by DemandShaper is a smart heating control product that performs scheduled demand shifts, reducing costs for homeowners and allowing electricity suppliers to better manage demand. Hestia implements a time-shifting algorithm to subtly alter domestic heating schedules, modulating electricity demand according to the needs of electricity suppliers.
Kudos Energy enables the group of households around each substation to earn rewards for their local community by manually flattening and balancing demand.
PowerVault is 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 percent of electricity bills, cutting electricity peaks and carbon emissions.
thEnergy is 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 is 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.
