Hanne Sæle

Demand Response From Household Customers: Experiences From a Pilot Study in Norway

This paper presents experiences from a pilot study focusing on daily demand response from households, utilizing smart metering, remote load control, pricing based on the hourly spot price combined with a time of day network tariff, and a token provided to the customers indicating peak hours. The observed demand response was 1 kWh/h for customers with standard electrical water heaters. By aggregating this response, the potential for demand response from 50% of Norwegian households can be estimated at 1000 MWh/h (4.2% of registered peak load demand in Norway). A cost-effective realization of this potential should have high focus when considering smart metering technology. From a market perspective, a potential load reduction of this size should be bid into the day ahead market. Demand response to price (the day after) will not affect the price, but might create imbalances and the need for activating balancing resources, creating additional costs.

An ontological approach for eliciting and understanding needs in e-services

The lack of a good understanding of customer needs within e-service initiatives caused severe financial losses in the Norwegian energy sector, resulting in the failure of e-service initiatives offering packages of independent services. One of the causes was a poor elicitation and understanding of the e-services at hand. In this paper, we propose an ontologically founded approach (1) to describe customer needs, and the necessary e-services that satisfy such needs, and (2) to bundle elementary e-services into needs-satisfying e-service bundles. The ontology as well as the associated reasoning mechanisms are codified in RDFS to enable software support for need elicitation and service bundling. A case study from the Norwegian energy sector is used to demonstrate how we put our theory into practice.

Energy Services: A Case Study in Real-World Service Configuration

Current eCommerce is still mainly characterized by the trading of commodity goods. Many industries offer complex compositions of goods based on customers’ specifications. This is facilitated by a component-based description of goods, supported by a variety of product classification schemes, e.g., UNSPSC and eCl@ss. These focus on physical goods – wrongly referred to as products – rather than on services. Services are intangible products, for instance insurances, transportation, network connectivity, events hosting, entertainment or energy supply. Due to major differences between goods and services, product classification schemes cannot support automated service scenarios, such as a customer who wishes to define and buy a set of independent services, possibly supplied by multiple suppliers, via one website. To enable such eCommerce scenarios for services, a service ontology is required that supports a component-based structure of services. Defining a set of services is then reduced to a configuration task, as studied in the knowledge management literature. In this paper we use a case study from the Norwegian energy sector to describe how a component-based ontological description of services facilitates the automated design of a set of services, a so called service bundle.

Finding e-Service Offerings by Computer-Supported Customer Need Reasoning

We outline a rigorous approach that models how companies can electronically offer packages of independent services (service bundles). Its objective is to support prospective Website visitors in defining and buying service bundles that fit their specific needs and demands. The various services in the bundle may be offered by different suppliers. To enable this scenario, it is necessary that software can reason about customer needs and available service offerings. Our approach for tackling this issue is based on recent advances in computer and information science, where information about a domain at hand is conceptualized and formalized using ontologies and subsequently represented in machine-interpretable form. The substantive part from our ontology derives from broadly accepted service management and marketing concepts from business studies literature. In earlier work, we concentrated on the service bundling process itself. In the present chapter, we discuss how to ensure that the created bundles indeed meet customer demands. Experience of Norwegian energy utilities shows that severe financial losses can be caused when companies offer service bundles without a solid foundation for the bundle-creation process and without an in-depth understanding of customer needs and demands. We use a running case example from the Norwegian energy sector to demonstrate how we put theory into practice.

Consequences for residential customers when changing from energy based to capacity based tariff structure in the distribution grid

This paper presents the trends towards capacity based grid tariffs and results from a work analysing the consequences different grid tariffs will have for residential customers, based on their consumption profile. The analyses are based on hourly meter data from 10.055 residential customers in Norway. The work is a result from the Norwegian research project “SmartTariff” (2014–2017), which aims to develop the future tariffs to be introduced when full-scale roll-out of smart meters have been performed. The results show that changing to capacity based tariffs will result in a reallocation of costs between different types of customers, and the customers will pay according to how they affect the distribution grid.