Consumer Preferences on Activity Adaptation in Demand-Side Response Survey 2023

Demand Side response (DSR) consists of a series of externally-driven control strategies aimed at adapting consumer end-use load to specific grid requirements (Pallonetto et al., 2020). The objectives of DSR include reducing the peak load, reshaping the load profile and maintaining the energy supply-demand balance. To achieve these objectives, energy price signals are a prevalent tool and are usually represented by various types of electricity tariffs, including Time-of-use (ToU) and dynamic Time-of-use (dToU). ToU tariffs have been used around the world and two famous examples in the UK, the Economy 7 and Economy 10 tariffs, are offered by several energy providers, e.g., British Gas and Green Energy UK. In the residential sector, the underlying belief is that consumers with ToU or dToU tariffs will reschedule indoor activities from hours with higher rates to hours with lower rates to save energy expenses. In this context, consumers’ responses to price signals greatly influence the efficiency of DSR but have not been fully studied. Most literature focused on designing optimization models assumes that consumers are always rational and economic agents, exhibiting optimal behaviours (Good, 2019). In addition, the optimal behaviours are usually designed by researchers from the standpoint of the grid, the society or the community based on aggregated monetary savings and the flexible range of activity start times. However, individual choices and many other influential factors in consumers’ adaptation of activity schedules are neglected, such as the seasons, working days, price levels, original time of activity, the heterogeneity of individuals/households and participants’ attitudes toward energy-saving, all of which may cause biased design and assessment of DSR (Good, 2019). Therefore, a stated preference survey, DSR-SP, was designed to collect consumers’ choice of adapting activities in hypothetical situations when electricity prices change in DSR. The results were used to build choice models and study the influential factors of these adaptation behaviours. The findings are used to estimate consumers’ real reactions to price signals in DSR and guide the design of time-of-use electricity tariffs. The DSR-SP survey collects four categories of data: (a) current activity schedules and tariffs; (b) the choices of adapting indoor activities in hypothetical situations; (c) attitudes toward energy conservation; and (d) socio-demographics. The current document outlines the survey design, stated preference alternatives and attribute levels as well as the structure and relationship between data files. Furthermore, the appendices contain a comprehensive description of the coding schemes used when processing the data (Appendix 1) and the Participant Information Sheet (Appendix 2). The sample questionnaire is provided as a separate document.