 This is the first of two keynote lectures we're going to co-host in conjunction with Gill and the IAEA and it's lead up to the taking charge conference that is being held in the mansion house in November and the team of today and of the next keynote is in keeping with the team of that conference and they're both looking at the consumer driven energy future so today the social dimensions of the grid and Dr. Anna Mangalini this is a debate that is it's time has come it's time to have that debate and you know Ireland we are at the forefront of the smart grid but our focus thus far has been on the technology of the smart grid particularly in the area of security and reliability of supply and automation and responsiveness to I suppose customer events particularly outages and the grid and restoring supply after those outages and getting you know making the grid more adaptive and I suppose the real challenge then is taking it beyond that and where you know the role of the grid in engaging the consumer and I suppose that's still very much a work in progress. I suppose in thinking also about the journey that the energy the electricity system in particular has has come in the last 20 years and is going in terms of the role of the grid in facilitating a decarbonised electricity future and energy future the whole societal dimension of the grid and traditionally you know costs particularly grid costs have been socialised across all categories of consumer so as the grid becomes more the enabler of a very very different engagement with consumers and customers can be on the grid off the grid partially off the grid be to be prosumers and what that means for the cost structures of the grid and what that means how everybody down can participate all of society can participate in the benefits from competition and new technology in the smart grid and the smart future is a key debate that is happening today and will continue to happen with policymakers regulators and indeed the energy industry and that's why today's discussion in today's lecture by Anna is very apt. This year ESB is 90 years old so it was established in 1927 and you know the role that ESB has played in part of I suppose the evolution of the Irish economy in our society and I believe that the energy companies even though ESB is a very different ESB to the one in 1927 or even the one 20 years ago were a participant in a much more complex energy market and energy setup and we believe that energy companies still have a role in leading the transition to a brighter future for society and for the economy in terms of leading the transition to a low carbon future. Having said that I'd now like to hand over to Alex maybe to introduce Dr Anna. Thank you very much so our speaker our very distinguished speaker this afternoon is Anna Mengeleini as Pat has said and holds an MSc in chemical engineering from the University of Bologna an MSc in environmental engineering as well as a phd in energy systems from the Polytechnic University of Turin and her main I suppose professional experience has been in safety and risk assessment of major hazard installations and she has you know gained I suppose through that significant international experience both in the public and in the private sectors. Her interest has been in particular as Pat has flagged in the human and social dimension of technology focusing as both her activities and research on these human factors and organisational aspects in safety so particularly as Pat has said timely opportunity this afternoon for us to hear from you we're looking forward to your presentation but before starting my presentation I would like to say a few words about my organisation and this is the presentation the title of my presentation and I would like to say a few words of my about my organisation I come and I work from the joint research centre of the European Commission which is an institute inside the European Commission we have around 2000 scientists and we cover many scientific disciplines inside the JLC we have and this gives us the role to connect disciplines and policies and to talk directly to policy makers the JLC as you can see is located in different countries in Europe in the Netherlands in Belgium in Germany Spain and in Italy and I'm located in Patton and my institute specifically is called the energy and transport and climate institute as you as already told you they joined the research centre hosts thousands of scientists that work to support the European Union policy in particular I'm working for the joint research from the joint research centre smart electricity system and interoperability and inside this my team we have been investing resources and the increasing capabilities on three strategic research line specifically on observing, simulating and testing and assessing the power system the emerging power system and the smart grid development in Europe and beyond beyond in particular we perform a data collection on power system and the smart grid project we have collected and so we host a smart grid database of smart grid projects in Europe smart grid of laboratories in Europe and we have also a DSO observatory we have also testing and simulating facilities to test and simulate relevant grid function on real demonstration projects and we also perform integrated assessment on the power system in particular we perform cost benefit analysis of smart grids we are involved in the assessment of projects of common interest and we are also following the smart meter in deployment in Europe here of course our being an institute focused on energy issues we are closely related and we perform our activities within the context of the energy union strategies as you may know the energy union is made up of five closely related and mutually reinforcing dimension and these are the energy security and solidarity the fully integrated internal energy market energy efficiency the carbonization of the economy and research and innovation to drive the energy transition after since the launch of the energy union strategy in February 2015 the commission has published several packages of measure to ensure the energy unions is achieved in particularly and of interest for our for my presentation is the new deal for the energy consumer that was released in July 2015 and inside this communication is specifically focused on aspect of the consumer empowerment on smart home as smart networks and on data protection and management following the new deal for the energy consumers the as you may know the commission has released a package of legislative proposals in November 2016 which is the clean energy for all Europeans that includes several legislative proposals that cover energy efficiency renewable energy the internal energy market security of energy supply and energy union governance and one of the key point of interest inside the energy union strategy and the packages that we have mentioned earlier is of course the role the consumer and community will play in the energy transition and one of the key messages as stated in the the energy union strategy is that activating consumer participation is a prerequisite for managing the energy transition successfully and in a cost effective way we see therefore that the consumer are placed consumers are placed at the center of the energy transition and are recognized as being the key players in the successful development of the energy transition another important topic a point that emerging the clean energy packages that of local energy community in the package the clean energy package local energy community have a definition they are clearly defined and what is interesting is to notice that local control and value driven rather than profit driven point purposes are highlighted as key features of local energy community indeed all our households including the energy poor and the vulnerable consumers should be able to benefit from the energy transition and they shouldn't be left aside and behind and indeed the local energy community may have an important role in driving energy savings and addressing energy poverty in concerning energy poverty it's also important to notice that to stress the fact that the commission has launched also a european energy poverty observatory and which should facilitate best practice sharing on how to fight energy poverty and of course in this context also member states will be obliged to measure and monitor energy poverty and to report it back to the commission a brief introduction we are talking now of course about smart grid just this was the political political context concerning the technical context we are talking about smart grids what are smart grids there are many definition many points of view and not a agreed common definition but in general we can define the smart grids and as an electricity network that can intelligently integrate all the users connected to it in order to efficiently deliver sustainable economic and secure electricity supplies in a brutal sense they are emerging an emerging set of technology and practices which have the potential to transform dramatically the electricity system in europe and around the world indeed the emerging electricity system will replace the traditional paradigm of passive distribution with a new paradigm of active involvement of the consumers through incorporation of information and communication technology what is important to notice is also that the emergence of electricity prosumers is seen as a fundamental and here again we are not talking anymore about consumer but about prosumer and prosumers is considered as in a broad in a broad sense as all consumers that not only passively consume energy but are also actively participating in the market generating value for themselves and for other markets for other players in the market okay in the in the next couple of slides i would like to give you to to present you and to introduce you to one of our main product of our observation activities which is the smart grid project outlook since 2011 the GSE has been providing the policymakers and different stakeholders with a tool to better understand the rapidly changing scene and to to anticipate the direction that europe is taking in the field of smart grids the first smart grid outlook was released in 2011 and there have been two updates one in 2013 and one in 2014 and the different edition of the report were based on successive updates of the database and just to give you an indication in 2011 we had around 220 smart grid projects in the database and in the successive update we reached the 460 updates in 2014 what is interesting in the report is that we provide indication of how many projects are ongoing in europe their geographical distribution the source of financing and the main stakeholders involved and the main areas also of investment of course you can find more detailed on the on the website on our website on the report but i would like to say a few words about the smart grid project outlook 2017 as i said in 2014 we had around 460 projects but in our update of 2017 and through a very in-depth research of what is going on in europe on smart grids we reached 950 smart grid projects and they sum up to around 5 billion euro investment we have looked into the source of finances of this project and so to national funding european funding of private funding we have identified all the different stakeholders we have a long list of stakeholders involved and we have identified the main area and domains in which these smart grids are focused in particular as you can see it's we have around 3000 organization involved in the in the these smart grids projects and 800 implementation sites meaning for implementation sites we mean the location in which the projects are actually taking place as i said for this outlook we carried out a very extensive internet-based data collection and that many contacts directly with the project coordinator and indeed this this effort led to the setup of this database which is one of the which is the largest database of smart grid projects in europe so since the presentation today is focused on the consumer of course have an interest that will focus mainly on projects that are whose domain is demand side management demand side management since these projects are inherently centered on consumer and allow for investigation of new trends in their strategies for consumer engagement in the following few slides i will present some results of the analysis we performed of these projects specifically on demand side management project as i said engaging and empowering through we are talking about engaging and empowering consumer and engaging and empowering consumer through better information is a key to behavioral change and to exploit the full potential of the smart grids technology of course smart meter data can encourage consumers to become more aware of the energy use consumption and possibly change their day-to-day behavior many people they don't know exactly how much energy they use and for which purposes and therefore providing them with information on the energy use can trigger behavioral change and in their daily activities in order to increase the consumers our consumers awareness and promote behavioral change it is necessary to provide consumer with informative and detailed information in energy in the energy use just to explain what we did in our analysis we tried to identify the first of all the most effective channels through which this information is presented to the consumer what we called feedback solutions and here for feedback solution we mean in-home display web portals ambient display then we try to see what kind of information is passed on the consumer with what kind of information we should pass to the consumer in order to trigger a behavioral change and first of all and then to meet their needs and their preferences and this is what we call the feedback information and then we focused on the way this information is presented and this we refer to feedback visualization which can be historical comparison for example or peer comparison so we try to identify that classify the DSM project demand side management project that we had and to see what kind of insight we could have in these three different aspects of consumer energy here in this presentation in this slide I summarize the consumer preferences and concerns and I compare the results from the European from European survey surveys on consumer preferences and attitudes with the finding that we have in the pilot project concerning the three aspects that I was mentioning earlier the feedback solution feedback information and feedback visualization as you can see there are different elements that that come that come up but what is important here to stress is that the the European surveys results are not always aligned with what we can see in pilot projects in in the field indeed for example an example that very often come up comes up is the fact of monetary incentive as you can see from the European surveys it comes up that monetary incentivize the consumer through monetary monetary through economic saving is coming as one of the most motivating elements while for example in the pilot projects it's clearly it clearly emerged that other engaging strategies such as stress in environmental savings and social welfare can promote consumer engagement and so you can see that there are differences in the way in consumer can can be engaging and and differences in what we can find when we ask consumers through surveys or when we go into the field and really deal with the consumers that are dealing directly with the technology here I would like to present again in these slides again how we went on to further explore the engagement and participation of consumer in smart grid project here we have used the same data set of demand size management project and we try to investigate if we have seen that there is a policy interest towards a more collective approach dimension of energy use and we wanted to investigate if this political as well as theoretical trends towards a more collective dimension of energy use is also reflected in the smart grid project on demand side management in Europe and specifically we we we we wanted to test if there is a wide in attention towards the wider context in which the consumers live and towards the social dimension associated to energy use and consumption indeed our analysis confirmed as you can see from these graphs that there is there is the european that these projects are increasingly been designed and developed having in mind a collegial approach to energy consumption for example we see that there are there is an increasing trend in involving local and local organization and local partners in smart grid projects and these local partners are mainly intermediary organization that work closely with the concerned community and and they are so therefore directly dealing with consumers we also notice that there are growing numbers of projects addressing multiple and user sectors for example here we mean not only addressing the consumer as and the household as an individual but also integrated into the the project also public partners industries and commercial actors this again points to in the direction of addressing households within a wider context where all the partners can build up a community partnership the other interesting finding is that there are an increasing number of projects addressing multi-service addressing multi-service element meaning that they also include together with electricity also gas water and heating and cooling and this cross-service approach is in line with the idea of a multi-stakeholder and municipally based partnership in which is at the core of the concept of smart communities the other thing that we checked and so we see in the previous slide that there is this interest in addressing the consumer more and more in their social context not as individual element not as isolated household but integrated in a wider context what we went on to to look for is to see if there are differences in strategies with which we engage the consumers and indeed we saw again that the consumer are more and more addressed not at individual level but at a more social level there are again when the consumer are addressed as individual we see that there are always the economic interest that are addressed as values and so what it's called in psychology self enhancing values and so they address mainly the egoistic the economic value or the comfort aspect but we see that more and more projects are addressing wider values they try to address also what we call the self enhancing values that is to say values that environmental values for example or social welfare values through difference engaging tools so what we see again is that many projects try to mobilize consumer response using a more participatory approach that builds on a sense of a community and of shared values and goals to conclude these two slides what we wanted to point out therefore it's that we can see that a more collegial approach to energy consumer exists even if an integrated approach is still missing and of course we are still trying to find and to link this new and novel approaches to project results but many projects are ongoing at the moment and we don't have yet results available in the last couple of slides I would like to mention something about energy and complexity I think it's come something that came up also during the lunch the fact that when we talk about emerging electricity system we talk about about many things many many actors and different point of view at stake for example this is on purpose a complex picture because the emerging electricity system is a complex word in which different layers of and different interest play and and indeed we think that any complexity science can contribute to the understanding of the emergence of the social also social tactical interface of the the emerging electricity system and can help in identifying tools and techniques for a better policy decision making and indeed the complexity of the smart electricity system rests on the multiplicity of interacting players that operate as independent decision makers with behaviors that leads to unpredictable performance of the overall system and the actor and indeed the social layer is considered one of the most complex layer in the emerging electricity system and in the social layer indeed the actors the consumers and the actors interact through physical and social network by sharing information and learning from one another through social interactions and this interaction produce a self-organization and emergent behavior in energy consumption and that very often can be unpredictable we see more and more that the current modeling approaches do not cope well with this kind of complexity of the emerging electricity system because the current modeling approach mainly focus on only some aspect of the emerging energy system and indeed incorporating complexity into the energy research can help in identifying emerging behaviors and challenges I would like to say a few words again on complexity and in the specific which kind of tools we can use for addressing complexity the computer meddling approach advocated for complex adaptive system is called is defined agent-based modeling and in this approach the system are modeled as a collection of autonomous interacting entities with which are have encapsulated functionalities and they operate in a simulation in a computational world indeed a BM agent-based mobile is a popular tool used in social sciences and it's been more and more considered as a suitable tool to address the complexity of the social technical interface in the emerging electricity system that are characterized by a strong interaction between the human and the technical system and indeed the agent-based modeling is considered as better suited so to model the consumer behaviors and in particularly we can model how values and beliefs at consumer level can produce changes at the macro level and we believe that this is a tool that can definitely help us in understanding the demand side of the energy system on the right side there is an example of a model that we have developed and is that specifically address a smart meter in adoption and I don't want to go into the detail because it's a quite a relatively complex model but what we try to do is to make the DSO the consumer and the social nectar interact and we try to characterize to provide the social characterization of the consumer that has values and concerns and through the social interaction with his peers is able to adopt his behavior and to adopt the technology or not when we have seen a different interesting finding also changing and giving different policy interventions of course you can find if you are interested more information on this on the article that has been published on a journal and we believe that this is can be an interesting tool and can be also seen as a reasoning machine to put together all the different elements of the system and to see how we can let them interact providing them with different rules and elements to play with I have some conclusion I conclude my presentation and he was saying that of course the summary is that consumer and the community are more and more placed at the center of the energy transition and of the European Union strategy we seem that smart grid technologies are believed and considered as the technologies that will transform the electricity system and the social dynamics and energy consumption patterns within our society of course there is the need to understand better the and to engage the consumer and this is he's done through different in different ways for example we have seen we have analyzed surveys we try to analyze what is happening in the field through the analysis of smart grids but and some times and it happens that the findings are not matching and are contradicting and so this means that we need to further research and further study to really understand this complex the complex nature of energy consumer and energy engagement and also to to consider also the importance of contextual factors that can influence and cultural factors that can influence and consumer engagement and involvement and more and more I think that it's necessary to have a multidisciplinary approach to emerging electricity system because very often as I said before the dominant approach is the technical approach we have the system and the system the technical system is available and is in place and we have to implement a let it work but this is not so easy because there are many other elements and especially nowadays if we want to go into energy transition we need more and more the involvement on the consumer therefore there is more and more the need to involve other sciences as for example social science to in to understand better what our drivers for consumer engagement and as I said also to help to ask help from other sciences as for example complexity science because we have too many elements at stake and we need really to understand how they are interacting and in the complex system