Sweden’s energy system needs to adapt to a new energy landscape with renewable production, decentralized distribution, and demand response. One of the biggest challenges is to build systems and create incentives for the purpose of enabling private customers to be flexible. As part of the project “AutoFlex”, academia [1]. and industry [2] work together with the inhabitants of Sala to identify existing barriers and develop strategies to overcome them. The aim of the project is to study the feasibility of an automated demand response program from both a customer and system perspective, develop guidelines for grid operators implementing power tariffs, empirically demonstrate that capacity utilization can be increased by at least 15% without physical investments in the grid, and study the impact of different optimization strategies on the outcome for customers and the grid. The project will provide increased knowledge on the technical, economic and social potential entailed in automated demand response. 

The goals of the project are to:

• assess electricity consumers and prosumers drivers and barriers to engage in automatic demand response programs as well as develop incentives to this end,
• assess the economic consequences of engaging in automatic demand response for electricity consumers and prosumers,
• assess the consequences of different automated control strategies (individual control based on e.g. power tariffs and the spot price vs. remote control based on peak demand in the local grid) on the load profile,
• assess the potential of the above mentioned strategies to match electricity consumption with renewable production and
• assess the social and technical potential of different power tariff designs to increase demand response.

If you are interested in contributing to one or more of the above goals as part of your degree project, please send a very brief thesis project proposal along with a short presentation of your academic background to Cajsa Bartusch via email, cajsa.bartusch@angstrom.uu.se, no later than 6 January. 

[1] - Academia does in this case refer to the interdisciplinary research group USER (https://www.uu.se/en/research/research-groups/user-en/), which partly belongs to the division Industrial Engineering and Management at the Department of Civil and Industrial Engineering at Uppsala University.
[2] - Industry does in this case refer to Ngenic (project owner), STUNS Energi, Sweco, Sala-Heby Energi and HESAB.