News

UKERC Report Launch : Fairness in Retail Energy Markets? Evidence from the UK

The Centre for Competition Policy and UKERC have published a new report on: Fairness in Retail Energy Markets? Evidence from the UK.

12th
Oct
2018

Doing More for Gender Balance in the Energy Sector

For the first time, this year’s BIEE Research Conference included a Women in Energy Session. This new session format featured a panel of three distinguished female energy experts and leaders from academia, policy and industry who shared their personal insights on three issues: personal strategies for women’s careers in the energy sector, corporate culture promoting diversity; and opportunities and challenges for women’s career advancements in consumer-centred energy systems.

28th
Sep
2018

Conference Blog No. 7 Unlocking the benefits to end consumers

UK Government’s commitment to decarbonise the economy along with developments in disrupting and decentralised technology and business models is driving a great pace of change in the way electricity is produced and consumed. For consumers we see new services and business models emerging such as peer-to-peer energy trading, home energy storage, smart tariffs (Time-of-use tariffs), Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) services, and ‘energy as a service’ when energy is bundled with other services and even goods. We believe that common arrangements that enable access to and interoperability between central and local energy markets (new and existing) is the best way to maximise the benefits from these emerging opportunities for commercial and domestic consumers.

31st
Aug
2018

Think green concept vector illustration.

Conference Blog No. 8 Unlocking Local Energy Markets

Much of the growth in renewable generation in GB is taking place locally at the distribution network level. Distributed generation has doubled over the last 5 years and now represents over a quarter of total GB capacity. This growth in distributed generation has the potential to transform the current market structure of electricity trading and introduce new markets and services, as well as new market participants. One new innovative market model approach is the local energy market (LEM) approach. The concept of the LEM is to establish a marketplace which draws together a community of renewable energy and low carbon generators, storage and demand side response providers at both the domestic and non-domestic level. Through the marketplace these providers can then participate in energy trading; entering both traditional and new market services.

28th
Aug
2018

Doing more for gender balance in the energy sector

BIEE’s first “Women in Energy” Breakfast Session, which has been kindly sponsorsed by Energy UK , will take place on September 19th at the BIEE’s 12th Research Conference. It has proved to be a hugely popular addition to the conference programme.

27th
Aug
2018

Conference Blog 6: Incentivising households to reduce electricity consumption: Information, nudges and peak pricing

The installation of smart meters means that new ways of incentivising consumers to reduce their consumption and to achieve a more flexible demand for energy can be introduced, whether that be via dynamic pricing or other methods. In my research, I look at consumers’ role within the energy system by analysing the results of previous field experiments and pilot studies which test consumers’ response to different incentives, and by testing on a micro level the responses of individuals to specific incentives in laboratory experiments.

13th
Aug
2018

ENA Open Networks Project launches Future Worlds Consultation

On August 1st Energy Networks Association’s Open Networks Project launched a major new consultation on electricity networks’ plans to deliver a smarter, more flexible and more decentralised energy system, a change which could save consumers as much as £40bn by 2050.The consultation published today seeks industry views on five models – the ‘Future Worlds’ – for delivering this change, presenting a wide range of options for the structure of electricity networks that go beyond those proposals made by the recent Cost of Energy Review..

6th
Aug
2018

Conference Blog 5 : Affordable Clean Energy for Consumers? Dream or Reality

The price of electricity for medium size households in the UK has almost doubled in a decade. The price escalate up from 0.10€/Kwh in 2006 to 0.19€/Kwh in 2016 representing an increase of 90%. There are big differences between the top-income households whose electricity expenditure represents 1.3% of their total expenditures and the low-income ones who spent 4.7%.. However by 2020, household electricity bills are estimated to be around £27 lower. However, can we trust in these predictions?

3rd
Aug
2018

BIEE 2018 : Video viewpoints

We have launched a series of short videos with some of our recent event participants on the topics that will be debated at the forthcoming research conference- the consumer, smart technologies and services, electric vehicles and heat.

26th
Jul
2018

Household investment in home energy retrofit – reviewing the evidence and designing effective policy

The energy retrofit of our domestic buildings (e.g. loft and cavity wall insulations, replacement of old inefficient boilers, draught proofing etc.) has seen many millions of UK and Scottish homes become more energy efficient in the last 15- 20 years. The demand for energy from our homes – electricity, gas and other heating fuels – has simultaneously fallen steadily in this period.