 Welcome to the round room at the mansion house. Very historic location for this country looking forward to its future. And today we are going to explore the opportunities of a consumer driven energy future. My name is Matt Cooper. I'm going to be the master of ceremonies for the day facilitating panel discussions as well as introducing our various speakers. And we would like to thank the ESB for it's sponsorship of this very timely conference now, just before we begin. Felly, mae'r doethau sydd mewn gofynig i wneud a'r drefnod ar y trafodd y defnyddio, mae'r ddiwrnod o'r wahanol a'r ddwyangei ar y maen nhw. Roeddwn i ddim ddim ddim ddim yn fwyaf i symud, ond ond yn hawdd i wneud, ymwrthedol i chi fod yn ei ffnwyr. Roeddwn i'r ffwnidd y cwmp compromised o'r cwmpredig, sy'n rhaid i'r dylai rhinofod i'r FFB 2017 i gweithio leol, 所以 those are are two hashtags, hashtag takecharge2017 and hashtag energy future and you can also find the speakers Twitter handles on the last page of your conference programme. Now we're also running a competition for the best conference tweet and for a chance to win a 100 euro one for all voucher. please use the hashtag, hashtag takecharge2017 and tag at the ESP group in your tweet before half past three ac sydd o safanc y tweedd yn eu rhannu gweldio eich gweithio ar gyfer wrth angen. O'ch angen, rydyn ni'n gweithio gwybodaeth ar hyn sy'n byrdig o'i'n effeithiau'r gweithio. Mae Yslydo, mae yma y byw'r bodys gweithio ar gyfer yn cyfrannu, mae'n rhaid o'n meir i gyd ynyn, gallwch y gyrfa i diwrnod, gan y peth yn y gallu i'n gallu gwreithio i ddechrau gweithio, oes yma'n ymddangos ni, yw ddiddor i gweithio hefyd siaradol yn rydych i gynrydd y panel. I don't come from your particular industry. So, the instructions are coming up on the screen there. To use Slido, please open the browser on your mobile phone. Navigate to sly.do and enter the event code TakeCharge. You'll be able to post your questions to the speaker at any time during the session. Now, if you're not comfortable using Slido, although we would ask you please to do so, there will be event stewards on the floor of the hall who will take your question in written format and will submit them then to the online platform for me to see. And another function of Slido is that it allows for instant polling of you, the conference audience. And we will be having a few polls throughout the conference asking your opinion on some key issues. So, we'll give it a go right now if you don't mind, just to make sure that you are on top of how to use Slido. So, if you go to sly.do or slido.com on your mobile device, enter the event code TakeCharge and on the top of your screen, navigate to polls. And just please answer the following question. Which sector uses the most energy in Ireland? Is it A, electricity, B, heat or C transport? So, A, B or C, A for electricity, B for heat or C transport? We're expecting it to come up. There we are. And that's the answer that we have been given. We've been told that the answer actually is transport uses 35% of energy, electricity uses 32% and heat uses 33%. Anyway, we'll come back to explaining Slido a little bit before our first panel questions and answer session. Now, earlier this year, ESB opened a new visitor centre at Ardnachrosia in County Clare to tell the story of the Shannon scheme. The Shannon scheme is part and parcel of our national history and national heritage. It brought 100% renewable energy to towns across Ireland and transformed a way of living that had existed for generations. 90 years later, it is still producing renewable energy for our nation. We have a short video now for you to see from the Ardnachrosia experience as a reminder of this great feat of engineering and the role that it continues to play in Irish society. For this country and so important, but we're now to look to the future. This is the first session of our conference towards a low-carbon future, so I'd like to invite Panodaurty, the chief executive of ESB, to give us the opening remarks. Thank you, Matt. Good morning, everybody. On behalf of ESB and the IIEA, I'm delighted to welcome you all here to the mansion house for what promises to be a lively discussion on a subject that is very relevant to all of us, not just in our professional lives, but also as consumers of energy and indeed as citizens. Changing customer expectations and rapid advances in technology, population growth, and above all, the threat posed by climate change are bringing about fundamental changes in the energy landscape across the globe and the way in which energy is generated, distributed and consumed. At COP 21 in Paris almost two years ago, the UN agreed the first comprehensive agreement on action against climate change, which committed the nations of the world to restricting global temperature increase to between one and a half and two degrees. In Europe, targets have been set for 2020, 2030 and 2050, which aimed to progressively cut carbon emissions by between 85 and 90% compared to levels in 1990. Here in Ireland, the government's white paper, Ireland's transition to a low-carbon energy future 2015 to 2030 sets out the goals and targets for Ireland in this context. The message and direction of travel is clear. We are moving to a more sustainable future and there is no turning back. Along with agriculture, energy is a major contributor to Ireland's greenhouse gas emissions. Together, transport heating and electricity generation account for over 50% of carbon emissions. How these sectors develop over the next decade will be a key determinant in Ireland's ability to meet its targets. Whether it's the fuel we use to heat our homes or fill up our cars or the electricity we use in keeping our lights on, transformative change is needed. Over the course of today, you will hear about how organisations, including ESB, are preparing for this change and in particular the role that electricity will play. ESB was founded 90 years ago this year and since then, electricity has become an essential part of all our lives, evolving over time from very basic appliances for lighting and cooking to powering everything from incubators in hospitals to smart TVs and mobile devices. But although the application for electricity has changed, the basic principles underpinning generation and supply have remained largely constant. Electricity has been produced in large century dispatch generating stations and distributed to largely passive customers over radial electricity networks. Customers traditionally have had very little interaction with the electricity system except to turn on and off the switch when they needed power. Other than basic night and day rates, they weren't incentivised to use less power at times when it was most expensive, or, indeed, to use more when electricity was cheapest. They couldn't produce their own electricity and they don't have a whole lot of control over their usage. All of this is changing and as it does, the consumer is coming front and centre of the emerging energy landscape. By 2050, the population of Ireland is expected to grow by about 30%, resulting in about half a million more homes being built and potentially a million more cars on our roads. This will massively increase our carbon output unless we completely transform the way we produce and consume energy. Over the past 15 years, the electricity sector in Europe has made great strides in laying the groundwork for more sustainable energy future. Much of the visible evidence of this is in electricity generation where wind farms, water panels and other renewable technologies are significantly reducing carbon intensity of electricity. Since 1990, the carbon intensity of electricity generated in Ireland has halved. Less evident but equally important has been the changes that have taken place on the electricity network to make this possible. Over the past decade, ESB networks has invested over 7 billion euro to make the electricity network smarter and more resilient. And to connect large amounts of renewable, primarily wind generation. The third wave of innovation in electricity is downstream where customers interact with the electricity system. New micro generation technologies like solar PV are freely available making it possible for customers to generate for themselves or sell power back to the grid. The internet of things is connecting everything from energy assets to sensors in the home and digitally connected customers are able to manage their energy and how they use that energy remotely through smart controls like Nest and like Climote. New business models are emerging that harness the collective power of customers to provide balancing services to the grid both centrally and locally. Battery storage and electric vehicles are opening up potential for large-scale storage of electricity. The possibilities appear endless. ESB's ambition which I will talk about later on this afternoon is for electricity to be a catalyst for change across the whole energy sector powering not only the appliances and industries that have traditionally relied on electricity but also sectors that are still dependent on carbon intensive fossil fuels such as transport and heating. Engaged connected customers are at the heart of this ambition. The willingness of ordinary people to adapt their lifestyles, adopt new technologies and engage as active participants in a new energy landscape is absolutely critical if we are to meet carbon reduction targets. For this to happen, their needs must be put front and centre of all new developments. What looks like the obvious technical choice isn't always the one that customers will sign up to. All customers are different. What is rational and exciting for one and what is exciting and frightening for another? People's belief systems, their values and their knowledge, their fears and their trust in our industry will all feed into their reaction to new products and technologies and will ultimately determine their success. Today's conference and it's interesting to look around the wall here and the questions that are phrased and maybe people haven't seen them but we'll just read them out here. What is Ireland's path to a low-carbon future? What do energy consumers really want? Will e-mobility transport us to a low-carbon future? How can the power of data help us save energy and money? And how can we put the levers for change in energy consumers' hands? These are key questions that are going to be exposed and debated here today and the conference is going to examine all of these themes and will hopefully shed light on strategies and approaches that can help us to ensure that as we move towards a low-carbon future consumers become fully engaged in the journey. I would like to thank very much our partners in this conference, the IIEA for pulling together what is undoubtedly an outstanding line-up of speakers. I look forward to hearing about some of the practical ways that organisations are already connecting with customers and communities and I hope that the insights from today's event will help us to collectively transition to a brighter, cleaner energy future with the customer's right-handed centre. Thank you. Thank you very much Pat. So let's start with our opening speakers and the award of this year's Nobel Prize for Economics to a behavioural economist shows the critical importance of behavioural psychology for modern business strategies. Our next speaker, Oliver Payne is the author of the book Inspiring Sustainable Behaviour 19 Ways to Ask for Change. He's also the founder and managing director of the Hunting Dynasty a London-based behavioural insight and communications agency which has worked with government, NGOs and energy companies such as British Gas. He's going to talk to us about inspiring sustainable behaviour so would you please welcome Oliver Payne. Thank you very much Matt. Morning everybody. As previously advertised, I am Oliver Payne from Hunting Dynasty. Everybody asks us why we have this name as we're looking for things that last for generations to come. Let me move on. How do I move on? How do I move the slides on? There's a big green button with an arrow on it. I need to rework this interface. Two things I'm going to do for you first of all. First thing is to move straight to the content slide so we can see the shape of the talk this morning. I'm going to have a little bit about me just briefly how I got here and not walking from the hotel obviously. We're going to do a little trot through decision making. It's the bare wrist of bare bones. If there's any psychologist in the room, don't worry about it. By the end of it, you'll know it. We're going to do a little stoop test as well which is reading some words off the screen. I know I'm as European as you are. Tremendously embarrassing doing that kind of thing, particularly in the morning, but the doors are locked and we'll never speak of it again. After that, I'll do all the heavy lifting and we'll go through norms. Have a look at some normative effects. We'll look at construal, habit and framing and some lovely examples about consumer behaviour changed on there. It's a little bit about me very quickly. I spent a little bit of my time in digital start-ups a long time ago and then 10 years in advertising on all sorts of businesses including mostly actually at the end of it on BP doing a lot of global digital work and around about 2007, so around about 10 years ago I started to look at how behaviour worked and I run the London Behavioural Economics Network which is 3,000 people in London and we have affiliates all over the world and a variety of clients that we work for. Particularly around the kind of 2007 mark I started to have a bit of a think about what really drives that behaviour. Having spent 10 years in advertising no one really cared as long as the work was good and won lots of awards and that led to a book around weaving psychology and behaviour and environmental behaviour so I pulled out some examples from the work that I researched around energy consumption and there's lots of other things in there as well. So decision making, the barest of bare bones it's true that we're not always in control of our decisions as we think we are and it's part of the weft and the warp of our language that we have the head and the heart my gut says this and my head says one thing and my heart says another but interestingly even though we can process 11 million pieces of information a second and we know those through the eyes the proportion is a little bit asymmetric in terms of our conscious deliberative thought we can only really deal with 40 pieces of sensitive information per second so that would be like if I turned the light on on and off very quickly after about 40 times a second you would not see any difference between those two things and if you drive imagine when you were learning how to drive a car you couldn't have a conversation with someone else when you were learning to drive it was automatic you can have a conversation with someone they're the two different memory systems that work we're giving an example of that so we can say that we're kind of outnumbered by automatic responses automatic responses are much larger than our deliberative thinking and not only that our deliberative thinking is draining, it runs out you know the kind of thing of like 45 minutes and you get tired after an hour you get tired of working on a task and you're not performed by our non-conscious response and we're going to echo all of that through the rest of the talk this morning even if you try and sort of avoid it you can't there's a very lovely example from parole board in Israel so parole board will be judges looking at bad men, usually men bad men in prison seeing if they're ready to leave prison and you can see there on the graph the judges made fewer and fewer favourable decisions as time elapsed from their previous break time and the non-conscious response was stay in prison deliberately trying to overwhelm it and becoming less and less effective as that as time went by so you're going to do that now as well I'm going to show you that, we're going to do the stupetest the stupetest is very simple all we have to do, all of us I'll do it with you as well all we have to do is say the colour of the word that's on the screen so we wouldn't say the stupetest we'd say blue, green and red that's it it's two parts to it, six words first and second I won't ask you to do anything else after this it's it, promise it's not one of those yay talks you won't have to make friends with the person next to you or anything like that it's fine so it's very simple, I'll do it with you six words, say the colour of the word do not read the word ready? blue, green, real genius that was amazing we're going to do it again six words this time don't know what the words are but you don't know what the words are do not read the word say the colour of the word that's it, you ready? of course and I went a little bit quick it gets quite tricky and what's happening there is that on purpose obviously we've pipetted the colour of the word different to the description and you can feel yourself effortfully trying to override your instinct to read the word first and then stop and try to say the colour and if you remember back the iceberg that's exactly what's happening your non-conscious response, your automatic response is to read the word and you're trying to overwhelm yourself to do that and this happens in these formats where I've explicitly made that the case this happens throughout our life all of our decisions have this pairing going on so it's fair to say pictured me in the morning ancient creatures in modern times we actually have these really good systems this is a very good way of functioning alleviating the burden of most of their thinking to automatic responses this is a very good way of living in short and brutal lives 100,000 years ago, not so good today okay, so that's it sit back, relax, I'll do the heavy lifting from here on in we're going to talk about norms norms is interesting, norms tells us that we have a shared understanding about expectations of behaviour within a group we tend to borrow decisions from the group let's show some examples of that so wouldn't it be true that the geographic clustering of solar panels we're going to go to California the geographic clustering of solar panels should be high in green neighbourhoods green neighbourhoods, lots of Prius democratic voters in America and low in non-green neighbourhoods that would be a fair assumption those attitudes should reflect the instance of solar panels however, Bollinger and Gillingham between 2001 and 2006 found that geographic clustering of solar panels in California appears at a neighbourhood level and does not simply match the density of greenness of the zip code why is that? well, norms decoupled action of insulation from attitude because of the visibility of the panels it was an evident and prevalent behaviour that was performed they found that every 1% increase of solar panels in the neighbourhood was a 1% decrease in the time to the next installation the more of a linear relationship the more that was there, the more that became there evidencing the prevalence of behaviour informs ourselves about what we should do in terms of our behaviour so how do we synthetically create that? we can do we'll stay on the west coast and we'll go to San Marcos this is a lovely experiment with the origins of O-Power they did a sample of 12,000 households and they put some different door hangers on the doors some different information information about social responsibility obviously in environmental condition as well you should save your air conditioning because it will make sense for the environment and some combined versions as well and they went through all those households for four weeks they did some door-to-door interviews and they had some meter readings so let's see what they said and how they behaved the descriptive norm is the one I want us to focus on the descriptive norm is a real picture of the experiment look at this line here how are most San Marcos residents conserving this summer by using fans instead of AC so that's a descriptive norm how most people doing it they're doing it this way most people thought that social responsibility message would be the most effective for changing behaviour also that an environmental message would be the most effective for changing behaviour nobody thought when asked these were the people that were being experimented on by the way nobody thought that a descriptive norm don't tell me what other people are doing that's not going to change my behaviour so that would be very ineffective indeed of course when we look at the average daily energy consumption during that intervention the descriptive norm is the lowest by far somewhere between 12.6 and 12.8 kWh almost a kWh per day lower than all the other interventions simply the only one to talk to the non-conscious response was the San Marcos what other people are doing so we can say that talking to our non-conscious response is invaluable we can know that we self report incorrectly we see this a lot as well our expectations of behaviour do not match our own behaviour and we do see a real decoupling between what we think affects our behaviour and what actually affects our behaviour the origins of O-Power we're all familiar with O-Power and how they've used this on their energy consumption reports so norms is interesting shared understanding about expectations of behaviour let's have a look at construal a little bit more tricky this one it's quite egocentric where you think about something relative to yourself affects what you think about it and that's not just in distance there's a lot of different things in there we'll have a look at psychological distance the first example of this I think is very good it's true that sustainable actions seem more feasible when you visualise them rather than verbalise them it's also true that sustainable actions are explained in how rather than why terms effectively you end up with visualise how much like you to act sooner on this rather than verbalise why most of the time we verbalise why let's have a look at this example from Sarah Parle they split two households they had people that were looking to do renovations on their home and they gave them some extra money and information about how to make their home more energy efficient months later very little action was taken of course you're giving them money and information what else would you want money is a good is a good bribe to change behaviour they thought that would be the case they went back and split them into two groups one group were given simply really a heat loss image of their home at night actually of their home much more proximal much more concrete much more here now given the same information as text so for instance on the infrared image you can see the windows are nice and bright so that would be telling you that that's where a lot of heat was being lost in the printed form it would say that it was one kilowatt hour of energy was being lost to your window and they did this and went back and had a look if the householder saw a thermal image they were eight times more likely to have installed draft proofing if they had not seen the image at all but not only that, five times more likely to have improved glazing and leaky doors and more diligent behaviour such as closing windows and careful use of curtains as Sarah Derby says thermal imaging seems to make energy more tangible it rematerialises energies when we talk about proximal constructions where you think about things relative to certain effects of your behaviour they thought about it much more proximal concrete they could see it if you like Sarah Paall says psychological distance seems to have a great potential for sustainability related perceptions California Edison did a similar thing they were texting people and emailing people around when electricity was expensive it was cheap in order to try and change their behaviour it didn't make any difference at all when they tried it with an orb simply an orb that either glowed green or red when price was at its peak people reduced their energy consumption by 40% during peak times a very simple way, a very non-specific way actually but a very simple way of rematerialising when it was expensive or when it was cheap and let's jump into the shower also using utilities at the point of use water use studied with labels there's a label here in the shower this label is not particularly excitingly designed but has a lot of information around rematerialising your use of water consumption and those labels you can see on the bottom line there they reduced water consumption consistently and considerably over no label condition so simply rematerialising the use of the utility at the point of use is a really good way of asking us to re-appraise what we're doing and how we're using it now slightly more ethereal but interesting nonetheless if you have a look at on the left food and on the right energy bill think about this many of us have energy consumption presented in raw numbers on the right hand side consider if you went to the supermarket in groceries in a hypothetical store without price markings at all and you were billed monthly with a kind of $527 for 2,000 food units how would you economise under such conditions well of course that's not how we purchase food it's always priced at the point of use there's other ways of doing this as well which you could actually sell units of energy at the point of use and of course smart meters do that too so we end up in a position where we're now rematerialising the energy at the point of use and then finally a little bit more ethereal again but rematerialising and naming the elements that we use is a very interesting point Institute for Physical Studies found that labelling winter fuel payment as cash that was it they found that £3 to spend on fuel some £97 of it was spent elsewhere when they labelled it specifically as winter fuel payment simply that £41 to spend on fuel so actually the naming that you give it gives you a proximal construction and gives you an idea about how it should be used rematerialise it so that's construal where you think about something relative to your self-effects, your definition of it and your behaviour Habit is an interesting one Habit ascribes the simplest and most repetitive tasks to Habit to relieve a burden of thinking about every decision from scratch it's a very good evolutionary tactic isn't that I get the papers every Saturday that's just a routine Habit is something that's completely unthinking so whenever I leave the house I always check my keys because the first house I bought I locked myself out within the first five minutes it was very embarrassing so I always said every time I leave the door I always check those things we'll have all of those habitual behaviours in us Having a look at water consumption so utility consumption in Australia which is a very hot topic the association between positive attitudes towards the conservation and actual water conservation was weak, was very weak actually what happened was that things such as habitually running a tap while brushing teeth maybe part of a long-term behaviour settled on when conservation was not an issue maybe 10, 15, even 20 years ago and of course when your older and attitudes have changed that seated behaviour hasn't changed at all as Department of Environment and Rural Affairs say attitudes may wander but everyday behaviours are likely to reflect long-standing routines and so explain the apparent gap between attitudes and actions the attitude and action gap is a really significant thing to consider and it's the work we have to do the most with most of our clients and consumers how do you deal with that well disrupting habitual behaviour is kind of the key to deal with those things Tim Cotter says fixed conditions hold habits in place if you change those conditions you can change the habit moving home is a good way of stopping people of having people change for instance their energy supply getting to them before they've moved is quite difficult of course most people move home except the default that's there and then it's very difficult to move them off again so this is a real key moment where we can change that behaviour and then so that was a habit let's have a look at framing so framing is around situational influences this one is the really tricky one that we don't like to kind of accept as individual humans but decision making is relative to what you can have not absolutely about what you want free will is actually a condition of the choice which is presented in front of us I'll give you a lovely example here from cars Hubr and Puto car choice experiment is great they gave people a choice of these three cars you can see there's different kind of dimensions there ride quality acceleration and mileage are all kind of different and quite complex dimensions as well when asked which would you want in terms of ride quality and safety most people chose this middle that was the middle option the kind of ride quality 50 accelerations kind of okay they'll have that mostly about minimisation of regret if you choose one of the extreme choices you could be two choices away from the best if you choose the middle it's generally okay most people choose that those people were removed the same people were a similar group were introduced with a new even better ride quality car in the set because remember what the middle choice was and then they asked which one would you like in terms of ride quality and safety most people chose a slightly higher version which was the extreme in the previous set Hubr and Puto we see a kind of 10% increase in preference for a target every time we do this and if we do this in terms of try it again with Marsbergallon which one would you like this one introduce a new lower Marsbergallon car which would you like this is the new middle option this is the one I want so actually this tells us however many of you outliers will be sold or however many options you've got on the outside the the range of options that you present will affect the choice of all of the other options in that option set so even introducing a newer or more environmental option for people will drag consideration towards it even if you don't see sales in that particular area so that was a little bit about me a little bit about decision making and sorry about that made you say things out loud in the morning very bad of me we had to look through norms, construal, habit and frame of course there's many more things to look at but these are the things I wanted to show you today just to round up it is a different era right now from a behaviour point of view we've gone from industrialisation in 1850 all the way through now to product services and behaviour as Tim Stout says from the national grid power station manufacturing company most of the company's efforts have been tied to infrastructure and hardware on their power generation changing consumer behaviour is the next wave of savings to be tapped and if there's one thing I'm going to leave you with is this last slide it's the only thing to remember well try and remember all of it but the only thing to remember is just there's no building lacks an architecture, no choice no building lacks a content thank you very much thank you very much Oliver and Oliver will be participating in our questions and answer session at the end of this session but our next speaker now we're going to turn to smart grid technologies that are changing the energy sector by opening up new ways for consumers to interact with the electric system so we're delighted to welcome Marguerite Serres managing director of ESB networks to discuss the smart energy technologies that ESB networks is adopting to meet this challenge so talk about smart networks for smart consumers please welcome Marguerite Serres good morning everyone as Matt said I'm the managing director of ESB networks and I suppose we're a bit of a on-seal company we do what it says on the tin so our job is to manage the primarily I suppose the distribution network in the Republic of Ireland but also we carry out maintenance and construction on the transmission network as well can I also just say we have a sister company and IE networks in Northern Ireland that's also part of ESB group and I'd say we've got very very similar issues but just in general terms the figures I'll be using today will just be for the Republic just so that people know so I suppose you know what are those issues that we're grappling with the moment what's taking our time, what are we thinking about and very much we're looking to project forwards and try to anticipate what our customers are going to need, what they're going to want by 2030 and it sounds kind of futuristic but when you think about it it's not an awful lot with a decades time so you might think actually it's reasonably easy to do but if you look back 13 years and you see the changes that we've had I suppose the one thing we can be sure of is we can't anticipate everything there's going to be services and there's going to be technologies that emerge that we just can't anticipate we can't conceive of right now 13 years there weren't really certainly a widespread use of smartphones or apps or anything like that and you can see how the world has changed but what we can do I suppose is work with trends and what we can see first of all from a customer perspective is what they want is increasing levels of choice so customers are going to want to have more control over how their energy is generated, how they use it how they pay for it and what they pay for it so I suppose from that point of view one of our jobs because we see ourselves in networks very much as the glue in the middle our job really is to be the transport system to connect customers to the energy that's generated in a lot of cases or to offload it in other cases so smart measuring is going to be key enabler to that and I'll come back a little later on to our smart measuring project second one and I suppose this is really important for our customers but equally it's very important for us as a society and that's the whole idea of decarbonisation and after yesterday's weather and particularly earlier in the year here in Ireland we need to be reminded about the extremes of weather that we see and we need to do something as an energy industry around that but particularly I think in networks we feel we've got a broader role with enhancing maybe the level of use of both EVs e-transport and also e-heating and that's something that we're really really keen to do and I suppose primarily our job first of all is to not get in the way of any of those things and that's a bigger challenge than you might think and the reason is that we're celebrating our 90th year this year and a huge amount of the network in the country and we have a lot of it that was built through the 40s and the 50s and the 60s and it wasn't built with any of the current usage that we have in mind and it certainly wasn't built with things like EVs and e-heat in mind that was just something I suppose again that wasn't conceived at the time to any large scale so we've got a real job in our hands now to make sure that the network that was built then is capable of delivering all of those new services and also capable of dealing with local generation if that's what people want and what companies want and what householders want now like I said we've been at this for 90 years so you said surely you must be able to figure it out but the real challenge here is to do it and to maintain reliability to make sure that the lights stay on that we keep our current or indeed enhance our current levels of reliability and the reason that that's a challenge is that most industries in particularly ours were very much built on predictability so largely we knew based on how it happened yesterday what was going to happen today and between seasons you'd see fairly significant changes but not from day to day so the patterns were fairly fixed and that meant that we could figure out what it was we needed to do on the network and we really adopted a kind of fit and forget approach so you picked the worst possible condition you could anticipate or plan for on the network you built your network to deal with that and then you could forget about the rest of the conditions but what we need in future is to be far more dynamic to be able to deal with load flows that we haven't seen in the past because now we've got generation infeed points at all sorts of points in the network not what we traditionally had which was a small number of big generators and the big generators fed into the network at high voltage or we transported from high voltage down through voltage levels until you got to quite small conductors which were tapered down through the system going into homes and businesses and now we've got those generation points everywhere so the load flows are changing dramatically and the key things for us as a network business is we have something called protection out there and we have protection devices and the idea with the protection devices is that yes they protect the plant but more importantly they protect life so they are constantly scanning the network and they're looking for unusual currents and unusual voltages and we programmed them up front to know what an unusual current or an unusual voltage is and if it sees those in microseconds it will trip it will take some action in order to keep people safe particularly keep people safe or to keep plants safe and it's more and more difficult now to actually program those devices to tell them what normal is so that whole area of changing protection that's a big challenge for us so having all these new services having them on network that was built a long time ago and also maintaining reliability that's a key challenge and the final one is affordability I mean again if you throw an awful lot of money it's something you can achieve an awful lot of money that customers want and what they'll be prepared to pay for it so we've got to move away I suppose from some of the traditional solutions we've had for very hardwired solutions and moved towards some soft solutions which is trying to find ways using technology and particularly insights into our network so that we dynamically plan and dynamically react and we're not in fit and forget mode anymore so I suppose to talk about the SMART grid then and what is that and what I'm showing there first of all is quite a typical traditional approach to the grid so effectively you had large generating stations feeding into the network and then you had customers connected at the other end at lower voltages and it was a fairly simple stable system I suppose at one level with very predictable unidirectional current flows in the last number of years we've had control centres then using remote technology to get I suppose better reliability and to get visibility of the network and they've been with us we've changed a lot so we've an awful lot more embedded generations so generation feeding into the network but what we're seeing increasingly with customers is that they want to engage particularly businesses but it will get to domestic customers as well they want to engage directly with renewable generators and maybe do some sort of transaction digitally with them and maybe use the transport system that we provide but not use the traditional methods of generating and we're seeing more and more and more of that so just to give you some idea of scale at the moment we've got 3200 megawatts of renewables connected sorry of wind connected to the Irish system in total by the end of this year there will be 4,000 megawatts of renewables on the system of one sort or another and the system peak is about 5,000 megawatts so we have a very very significant penetration of renewables and about 50% of that is connected into the distribution system which isn't I suppose what we've traditionally had we've mentioned earlier there's lots of changes happening as well in battery storage and again in future home owners are likely to totally change their patterns depending on their usage of batteries they'll be able to store electricity and indeed they'll be able to trade back with other companies and aggregators and possibly even other households in future using their own battery storage and maybe energy they've generated themselves at the same time they're obviously going to want comfort in their own homes so we're back to the idea of needing to deal with e-heat type loads but also to provide probably not so much in Ireland but air conditioning load as well so comfort within homes is important I mentioned this concept of householders trading with each other avoiding all of the traditional energy players just dealing with each other again we think as the transport system in the middle that we've got a role to play there but our job is to enable that with whatever kind of digital transactions or currencies might happen and I've mentioned e-transport is a ability of the network and that is going to require an awful lot more internet of things and communication systems in order to help us to do that now the other thing that we need to bear in mind and Pat alluded to this earlier on is that we can't forget who our customers are either cos not everybody will want to play in this very sophisticated quite tiring when you think about a new vista with all of this stuff going on in the energy market some people will want to maintain a system very much like what we have at the moment but still they pay it and they don't want to think anymore about it they don't want the complexity of all this trading and dealing and I suppose looking at the census and it's difficult to stay away from generalising here but just to give you a sense based on the last census one in four of our population in 2030 will be over 65 now they might be extremely interested and have time on their hands and have the disposable income to play in that market or they may not and certainly I think we can anticipate all are really saying is we can't leave all of our customers won't want to do that and we can't leave anybody behind the other thing is only about two and five are going to be the decision makers within any household so we've got three and five are dependents so we'll be really dealing with I suppose the people that are the decision makers within householders and households within businesses the other demographic that's changing is the volume of people who are renting versus owning and that can change and if you interact with energy you may not have the wherewithal or the permission for example to put solar panels on your roof if you don't own the property so that's something to bear in mind another one is there's very different things that we can do in urban locations and rural locations they're just different typographies the distances are different the network is different whether somebody lives in a house or an apartment makes a difference whether you've got the geography or a small wind turbine and certainly people's disposable income and the link between that disposable income and the demographic is important so in summary I suppose what we're looking at for future electricity networks is that we need to at the very least maintain our current reliability despite all of the new services but really to increase capacity so that we can deal with and encourage indeed e-heat and heat transport where there's huge amounts of emissions and where we can have a big impact on climate change to do that we're going to need real-time acid visibility we need to know dynamically what's going on in the system and react to it and put systems in place in order to do that and we also want to maximise and make available consumer flexibility so again the consumers in so much as they want to can play in the energy market so I suppose the question is within ESB networks then what are we doing about that and we have developed eight different road maps looking at those key areas things that we have to work on and I suppose those eight road maps are a summary of 57 individual projects that we have that we're working on to try and I suppose get the best future flexibility for customers without actually spending a fortune on it though it is going to cost some money obviously so the kind of projects that we have they're customer engagement making sure customers can engage with each other and with us network resilience which I've mentioned already is extremely important as is the electrification of heat and transport the flexibility on our networks not using them in the traditional manner not having fit and forgetting much more dynamic but also enabling customers to use flexibility as well and to trade back with the grid connecting renewables is extremely important for us and like I said we've made greater inroads as a country in that area and then operational excellence how we operate the system final one is or the final two or first of all we've got a huge amount of assets out there so we need to optimise those assets and also then how we interact with the TSO which is air grid is also extremely important because the boundaries aren't the same as they were in the past they're getting a little bit more fuzzy so you'll be glad to hear I'm not going to go through 57 projects but I'm just going to give you a little bit of a sense of some of the trials and projects that we are doing so the first one is if we are to enable large amounts of heat and also electric vehicles connecting to the system then what we need to do is to make sure the system can take that and they are much heavier in terms of demand than in the past the other thing we make a lot of use of in distribution planning is diversity which is that not everybody uses the same things at the same time they don't all go for a shower at the same time they don't all put on the washing machine or the cooker at the same time obviously there's peaks at certain times of the day but EVs are a particular challenge because if they're all plugged in at the same time then that does put a real strain on the network and that's something we have to be conscious of and with that in mind I suppose you'd expect us to be I suppose producing new standards which we have done for particularly urban housing estates so that from the middle of next year onwards with the permission and I suppose from our regulator what we'll be intending to do is to have a new standard for building and housing schemes so they will be able to cope with the significant penetration of both heat things like air source heat pumps particularly and also EVs I suppose the real challenge for us is when we heard it earlier on when one person in a location gets an EV or a heat then other people tend to do the same at clusters and that's really what the challenge is for us so we're going to have that, we've done the research on that so we know what we need to do and the real key with that is to make sure that I suppose that the costs up front when you're particularly building housing estates is very much in the civil works so it's actually quite a small marginal cost to make sure up front but we've got enough capability in the network for e-heat and heat transport so that's what we're planning to do but then the question is what do you do with all of the expanse of traditional network that we've got and this one I suppose gives us a much bigger challenge so there's a number of things we're looking at for many years now we've had a project that we've been quitely doing in the background which is to convert our medium voltage network from 10,000 volts to 20,000 volts and what that meant is we could deliver twice the amount of power on the same network and that meant that we significantly reduced electrical losses down to a quarter what they would have been which was really significant in terms of again as an environmental project so we're looking at the low voltage that we have now and trying to do something similar so low voltage at three phases is 400 volts and we're looking at the potential of operating that at 1,000 volts which does mean putting in additional what are called sidewalk transformers but it is a trial that we will be doing because it will mean to a large extent we can exploit our existing network and we can demand of e-heat and e-transport penetration the next one then I suppose is on our low voltage network again and most of the action before has been on higher voltages now we're very much looking at low voltage so we need this real time monitoring so we can react to it there's something called an LV Smart Fuse which again has intelligence built into it scans the network and can react to it we need to broadcast and what we mean by that is we need to let devices know what's the optimum time to come in so we can get to a situation where when there's capacity on the network can talk to your water heater and tell your water heater that now is a really good time to switch on or otherwise so you can see that there is big scope here in terms of future enabling of customer choice and customer interaction so like I said interacting with the devices and homes one trial that we have on the go at the moment in the renewable space is in cavern and it's with a number of wind firms and I suppose again to give you an idea and I'm simplifying this now I'm ignoring voltage but from the point of view of capacity the way we decide how much capacity there is a network to offload a wind firm for example is to look at what the local load is and look at the capacity of the line and that's the maximum you can have so to give you an example if a line has got 20 mva of capacity and there's about in summer 3 mva of load and the maximum that you can take out is 23 so the 3 that's used locally plus the 20 on the network but that's really only the worst case scenario on summer and most of the year maybe that load is up closer to 7 or 8 mva so that would mean we could offload 27 or 28 mva rather than the 23 so it's back to I suppose getting away from this vision forget idea again and what we're looking at doing there is dynamically changing the output depending on system conditions so at the moment it's being done manually so we have our controller operators that are monitoring that and actually having a phone call with wind firms telling them what they can export we're doing a second phase by the end of this year it'll actually be just the beginning of next year where that will be done automatically over technology to a large extent now the monitoring will still happen locally but the communication with the wind firm will happen remotely and the third phase then is it's entirely automatic but again going back to my idea of abnormal currents and voltages there's an awful lot of logic that has to be programmed in and it's very complex to take account of all of the conditions that you might see on the network and to allow certain things to happen but still to keep plant and more importantly people safe so we're also using as you'd expect I suppose drones and something called LiDAR which is light detection and ranging equipment things like our transmission system so we can get a really good look at the physical condition of a transmission line or a 30 AKV line without switching it out LiDAR is this idea of kind of graffing what we've got out there in terms of network and one of the key ones here the first one the red that you see there is our network and the green is vegetation and vegetation management is huge for us so just going back to storm Ophelia there fairly recently our network itself stood up really well our big challenge is actually branches and trees and that's what we have to be conscious of all the time so we spend a lot of our time and vegetation management and this sort of technology could really help with that and equally can help us to map out our network and to plan our networks and towns so I mentioned smart measuring earlier and we had a launch of this project and this one we feel is really really fundamental to most of the things that I've spoken about and to help customers to have data to decide what it is that they want to do and we're doing this project in three phases so we've started with our IT system and there's a lot of back end work to be done on the IT system so for the next three to four years we're going to be focused on that and also rolling out the initial meters to people who are really really interested I suppose in engaging in having a smart measuring early on so we'll have 250,000 meters out on the system within the next four years and then we'll be moving on to phase two which is to give bigger amounts of flexibility and functionality so as well as customers getting data we'll also be able to switch remotely which will I suppose save people from being at home if they are not needing to meet an appointment with us and the third one then will be around engaging with gas meters for customers I suppose want to do that they do have a gas meter and also if they've got local generation that all of that information would be available to them and would be traded through the smart meter so overall I suppose we have a lot of technologies including you know smart fault indicators self-healing networks resource reliability we've got the smart metering project which is going to help us with customer flexibility as our controllable generation and a project we have called Servo in terms of acid visibility we need an awful lot more information coming back to us so we can make decisions and that's going to require an awful lot of communications infrastructure, internet of things and architectures and radio technology so overall the system that we're looking at having in the future is I suppose very complicated when you look at it the job for us is to make sure that we present that as something very simple to customers and we're certainly looking forward to doing that and playing a really big role in decarbonisation and in helping with our climate change challenge is that going to be easy? No it's not, is it going to be interesting along the way? I'd say it definitely is in every sense of the word but is it possible? I suppose we certainly hope so so thank you very much, there are plans for ESP networks Thank you very much Marguerite Smart networks aim to enable the energy demand side to become increasingly active in creating efficiencies which can make significant contributions to the decarbonisation of the energy sector and so we look forward to the insights of our next speaker Sarah Bell is founder and chief executive of Tempus Energy an innovative and award winning energy demand response company so to talk about the future of demand response would you please welcome Sarah Bell Thank you very much, it's lovely to be here today We've had the privilege of getting to know ESP through the free electrons program For those of you who are not aware what this program is it's basically an innovation dating service I guess The utilities have got together selected 12 different start up companies around the world and then have spent a lot of time of six months getting to know those companies and we've been incredibly impressed with the seniority of the people that ESP has sent to this program it obviously takes up a lot of executive time but people do business with people so unless you get to meet the appropriate people it's very hard for start ups to really help utilities to innovate so it's been great to have that opportunity to get to know ESP The former Australian Prime Minister was in London recently talking about all the benefits of climate change As temperatures rise fewer people will die from the cold because of course no one dies from heat exhaustion no one drowns in a flood, right? I think the big challenge with getting involved in climate science debate is you keep having to deal with lunatics whereas if instead you focus on the economics and get on with using technology innovation to clean up the energy system in the lowest cost possible way then all of that stuff just becomes noise so that's the approach that we take at Tempus our mission is to try to change energy systems both for customers and for the environment Flexible demand so customers who are prepared to be flexible with when they use electricity if you match that flexibility to renewables then you get the lowest cost way of decarbonising our energy systems it enables renewables to outcompete but of course to outcompete you need to have a market to compete in and that's often the challenge in energy markets if we're trying to get to 100% renewable a completely clean energy system then we're going to have a lot of flexibility challenges if you look at this chart here in the grey space that's basically over supply of renewables in a proper market that should equate to a really low or negative price because the market should be telling customers to use electricity the orange space should be unbelievably expensive because we don't have enough we want to signal to customers don't use unless you have to so what Tempus actually does is put technology in customer premises to enable them to automatically move to the lower price periods and avoid the high price periods so renewables become supported by demand flexibility and the customer experiences a lower cost energy so it's a win-win for the environment it's a win for customers put in a different way moving customers out of peak demand into the lower demand periods as customers we know that being flexible pays many of us have been using off-peak trains for years why do we do it? because if it's not inconvenient we would like to benefit from a lower ticket the electricity system is exactly the same if we can persuade customers to be flexible and therefore enjoy a lower cost energy bill then they will be prepared to be flexible and from a system point of view we'll have to build fewer networks like we can build fewer train lines and pay for fewer generating stations like we buy fewer trains so to customers this actually will make complete sense but the challenge is that customers in most markets don't get access to that ability to be flexible because the incentives simply aren't there instead of showing like in the previous slide the orange space instead of showing that's unbelievably expensive what we do is we take that cost and we smear it by smearing it we actually lose the innovation opportunity because companies like mine can't make enough money out of flexibility and therefore it doesn't happen so I guess and this is the challenge I think in any country we need courageous politicians who are prepared to stick their neck out but kind of good luck with that right? so therefore as an industry I think we need to be showing that this is possible pushing it from a technology point of view and showing our comfort with being able to use and create flexibility so that we can drive that courage essentially what flexible customers do in a proper economically rational energy system is they effectively withhold demand and push prices down now around the world we have a range of different markets from at one extreme places like the Middle East or China where there isn't really a wholesale market at all through to the other extreme which is Australia where it's the most volatile electricity market in the world in most states there aren't capacity markets so all the value is actually in the market so tempest is currently working in Australia and the reason why we're so attracted to that market is we want to demonstrate that if you use the economics of supply and demand you can actually decarbonise at the lowest possible cost and by putting equipment in the customer premises this is an example of a car to just to get everyone's imagination going but we work mainly in the commercial and industrial space but there's no reason why this can't be delivered right down to individual customers by putting equipment in their premises and using machine learning to understand their load we can automatically move it so we don't need the customer to be involved the customer doesn't need to be an energy trader I personally think that many people won't want to be energy traders and therefore we have to use technology to make this as simple as possible with air conditioning load for example you can pre-cool a building and then turn the chiller off when prices are very high with electric heating you can do the same obviously you need to understand the thermal capacity of the building in order to do that but there's multiple different loads that can be used for flexibility we ran an electricity supply business in the UK for about 18 months which was like an experimental hub for us for a small tech company to run a utility is very very challenging we don't have your sort of balance sheet but we needed to run this business to be able to show that this is possible because no utility was prepared to use our technology because no one had done this before so we put equipment into various different customers for example Hertz we were able to significantly reduce their energy cost because they were flexible in a proper market and there's now a joke in the free electrons program about proper markets because I went on and on about this so much it's a particular passion of mine but in a proper market you can really save a lot of money in Australia up to 60% of the wholesale energy cost because in a market that spikes at $14,000 a megawatt hour customers avoiding those periods obviously make a lot of sense that's a very very large saving through the electrons program we've done the free electrons program we've done a deal with the largest electricity supplier in Australia now as a tech company you have to align the commercial interests no existing utility is going to do a deal for the hell of it why would they? they need to find business models that make sense to them so Origin owns half the generation they supply to customers so for the other half they're completely exposed to electricity market price risk so if a customer uses electricity at $14,000 a megawatt hour and Origin has sold them a fixed tariff of say 30 cents a kilowatt hour and unbelievably loss making customer so by us helping that customer move away from those periods Origin creates a more profitable customer and the customer can get a lower bill and the environment is better so finding those commercial win-wins is incredibly important so what we do is we use machine learning to price predict we're not an electricity trader we're predicting forward prices what we're predicting is what the closing electricity market price is going to be for a given period in real time so to do that you need to predict demand because you need to know where demand is going to cross supply because that's obviously the price point so we predict that price very accurately and we then rank the periods so the absolute price prediction is actually not as important as the ranking you need to know which is going to be the most expensive period and when is going to be the least expensive period so we use machine learning to do that price prediction and on top of that because we have understood the capability of the customer to be flexible we're basically combining that understanding of flexibility and thinking about a customer's flexibility like a commodity a little bit like say coffee beans we want to sell the coffee beans before they go off we don't want to sell them too early and we want to make sure we maximise the value from them we think about customer's demand flexibility in the same way and we're effectively trading it to make as much money out of it as possible and that's why this is such a profitable way so you can see in the bottom red chart we've become very accurate at predicting the price even though this is a very spiky market a lot of organisations who are less keen to change are reluctant to accept that customers will be prepared to be flexible but I believe very strongly that the combination of convenience using technology to actually make this easier for customers with the right commercial incentives can drive this market but that's why it's so important to get the right incentives I am frequently astounded by the attitudes to customers from various different organisations obviously not ESB recently the competition and markets authority did an investigation into the energy market in the UK and their findings were quite interesting and I paraphrase customers are stupid and lazy and need to get off their fat arses and switch supplier customers are not stupid or lazy they are busy we all lead very very busy lives that's why it's so incredibly important for technology to help customers to make this easy and convenient and for the right commercial incentives to be there we're in a very different world now as an energy industry we need to make customers love these propositions but to do that we need to actually earn that love and I think that's the challenge for all of us in the room today thank you very much thank you very much Sarah and all of our speakers in this first session it's going to bring us to our first panel questions and answer session they're going to answer questions that you have posted versus via Slido as well as the questions that I am going to ask you can still submit a question by navigating to Slido on your mobile phone browser entering the event code takecharge and you proceed by picking and then we go on and we take these questions from Slido I have a couple of questions I want to put to the audience just for a show of hands and I'm not trying to pick on accountants here do we have any accountants in the room? just a matter of interest anyone show a hands accountants? just one down there two, okay now the reason I ask is accountants I think in businesses are known for keeping a very tight management on the costs always looking to reduce bills try and make sure they spend as little as possible of their company's money many people here reckon that when it comes to the management of their all household finances that they're as diligent as the accountants and the companies in which they work are how many people can honestly say that they are nobody is putting their hand up that doesn't surprise me how many people here would think that they actively manage their own domestic electricity bills that's a relatively small number everybody who's here who think they actively manage it and when it comes to actively manage amongst those people how many do it by investing in the newest technology to let the technology do the work for you again small number putting their hands up how many people just actively do it by deciding to go around switching the lights off or turning off the hot water and all the rest of it or telling other family members to do so ah that's where everybody is putting up their hands Oliver how does that strike you because it seems to me it's the old fashioned way of dealing with switch off the lights, turn off the hot water rather than investing in new technology to help reduce the bills it's the easiest way of doing it and having some new infrastructure it involves quite a lot of decision making and action and full thought it's much easier to manage energy consumption in the moment ok so how much of it then comes down to as well to see the difference between what their bill is and what they're paying and what it could be if they were to actively manage their energy consumption the rematerialisation is a really interesting point and focus on it a little bit when I was talking earlier the fracture between what you're doing in the moment and what that means the more that's decoupled the harder it is to understand what you're actually doing and the consequences of that are the supermarket example was a very good one Smart metering take up is something that I want to bring up at June Marguerite as you mentioned targets and whatever but again how much of it is that ESP is just going to actually have to almost push smart metering on people almost presented to them here you are this is what you must have rather than waiting for the consumer to come along and ask to have it we're going to be in the area of customers needing and wanting to opt in to smart metering which actually I suppose is part of the European directive to be honest anyway that you have to opt in but it might actually work in our favour because and maybe Oliver is a viewer on this but from the point of view of psychology if you feel something has been forced on you you're probably much less likely to get engaged with it but the fact that if people see benefits if we get to a situation and we have something like the orb that you mentioned earlier that shows when prices are high when they're low and if people can see information like that if it's convenient for them if it helps them save money then we might get a higher much higher level of engagement particularly if people feel that they have an option to say that that's what I'd like rather than I have to have You're interesting about pushing a choice on people is correct and it's really bad it's very disnabling and even if you came to that conclusion separately you wouldn't want to be pushed into that it's actually very easy to do the uptake of smart measures is very easy to do and simply need to use something called the injunctive norm which is quite easy Explain that to us So the descriptive and injunctive norm are quite different the descriptive norm tells us that that's behaviour commonly performed that we talked a little bit about that a good example of that is that most people will break the speed limit that's behaviour commonly performed the injunctive norm is behaviour commonly approved they can be different and most people will say that speeding is bad don't speed because you might harm me so you can see a decoupling between the descriptive and injunctive norm a very good example of this was a lovely little experiment in America on water tap inserts and stuff for the lavatory flushing thing it doesn't matter what they were necessarily went down one street knocked on the door and said we're from the federal government and we have some tap inserts they're free would you like them it was a low uptake of that it was strange it was out of the blue it was unscheduled why would I have something for free it's very suspicious there's lots of challenges with that they went down the second street simply asked people do you think that water conservation is a good idea you could simply replace energy conservation water conservation is a good idea most people will say yes to that there was no demand other than just do you think it's a good idea they went down the third street knocked on the doors and said hello most people in this area think water conservation is a good idea would you like some free tap inserts the majority of people will take them that's an example of the injunctive norm in that area you could say the provincial norm as well people in this area think that water conservation is a good idea people in this area think that smart meters are a good idea you can simply synthesize that or generate it by asking the people in the area to whom you need to deliver smart meters it's a simple open-ended less specific question do you think that it would be a good idea if you could see how much energy you were using and how much it was costing you most people will say yes then you use that 85% of people in postcode think that being able to see how much it uses is a good idea come and get your reply for your free smart meter done, that's it some of the questions that are coming are very slide I'm going to put this to Sarah and Marguerite how can we ensure that the new tariff structures enabled by smart meters don't become so complex that they make it harder for consumers to understand their use this is very interesting because when you take things like mobile phones for example people are completely confused by the packages available to them and don't know which one to pick Sarah? I think the tariff structures don't have to be complicated when we ran our supply business in the UK we still gave customers a flat tariff on the basis that if they're prepared to be flexible then they deserve to benefit so it was actually very very straight forward I think if you put too much complexity into it it's very off-putting for customers Marguerite are you reviewing that? I suppose from a regulatory perspective I have to stay miles away from tariffs but just as a customer I think it is ripe for that level of confusion and complexity as they were seeing some of that already I'm really a big fan of something really simple price high price low now is a good time to use it now isn't it and I think a lot of customers in the same space because of your busy customers but it is a potential risk and it's not a simple gradient line from more complex to less complex there's a real drop off if you make it simple and simple doesn't just mean that you're losing out in presenting information we have something called satisfacing and we tend to when things get really complex we put a flaw on our expectations rather than a ceiling on our expectations so instead of going for the best we try to minimise it and go make sure we don't get the worst the same reason why we'll have McDonald's when we're abroad and we need something to eat very quickly it's not because it's the best meal we can get but we know that it's not going to be the worst either that resonates very well with the audience good but also things that when you look at a phone taris will go with price rather than all of the indications will go with brand because why not that's another way of doing it I don't make a choice based on brand or price because I want to make a choice based on brand or choice I make a choice based on brand or price because it's too complicated to make a decision in any other way so the reduction of simplicity is very important in terms of engaging uptake for people Margaret mentioned decarbonisation the question that strikes me all over on the basis of what she was saying do people actually think that their behaviour influences the weather outcomes in the sense that it strikes me that a lot of people say it's always somebody else that here in Ireland well industry says it's farmers who are creating the carbon individuals say it's industry and farmers Ireland in general says well we're only a small country it's China is doing it Ariely says it very well it says if you wanted to invent a problem that was the most psychologically different to deal with you'd come up with climate change it's distal in all dimensions it's not here, it's not me, it's not now and it's not clear it's very difficult to deal with that thing same thing with earthquake no one buys earthquake people that haven't bought earthquake insurance before the earthquake all of a sudden buy it on the day of the earthquake just because it suddenly becomes very proximal hear me now and clear so those are problems yes but to deal with it is not to just try to convince people that that's not the case because that is the thing that they think is the case it's to turn it much more provincial to tell people how other people behave is the way to do it the solution to that problem is to avoid it basically because the question has come in from another person in the audience which is more important individual behaviour change or societal change it's a really good question there's a big feedback loop between the two because individual behaviour because societal behaviour is an aggregate of individuals behaviour but some of the examples we've been talking about today are using society's behaviour or perceptions of behaviour as a feedback loop to change individual behaviour but the bold question to the answer which is more important individual behaviour change or societal change is individual change it's simple to do and it's simple to do on mass and then you will see a change in society can I come in there I think the opportunity to make it real is definitely there in things like air quality many organisations who are striving to to help climate change have had no success in focusing on actually deaths from poor air quality how to clean up the air etc etc it's something that we as humans can actually relate to climate change is so far away from our reality it's very hard to engage in it but it is possible to make it much closer but also to make the process of getting involved more exciting and interesting but it's linked to that as another question that's up on the screen is behavioural change in the electricity sector more difficult to bring about than in other sectors Sarah Marguerite your views on that Sarah first I think I'm not an expert in behaviour change but I don't think it's any harder in the electricity system than anywhere else in terms of behavioural change what is hard in the energy sector is where the incentives sit it's much harder as a company to come up with a really compelling proposition to a customer if you can't access the value from the system Marguerite I think to some extent it's because we're trying to change something that people have always used in a particular way and now trying to ask them to change their behaviours there's a level of disassociation between people's behaviours within their home and choices they might make in the longer term so up front to try and get engagement around e-heat and heat transport we can see at the moment in terms of EVs in the country there's quite a slow take up so there are other factors that people will take into account so I think you have to present it as something that you will do if all other factors are equal maybe might be the case so there's a price challenge with EVs for example so I think people would choose EVs if they felt that the price was a little bit more comparable to diesel so there's other factors that have to come into play I think a big untapped well it's maybe not untapped we're certainly making some efforts there as to it's back into that area of the 60% dependence for particularly children and they can form a really really important conscience within homes once you educate them in schools about the impact of climate change so that idea of pester power that's hugely powerful so we're starting to work in schools but I think a lot there's an awful lot that could be done with children in schools that would have an impact within households maybe more so than engaging with the adults link to that and I think all of you can maybe have an opinion on this a question there from Claire who's responsibility is it to and I like the use of the words push and cajole and encourage changes in consumer behaviour is it politicians and policy makers is it industry, is it green NGOs Oliver there's an interesting implication in the question which is the responsibility to push and cajole and encourage let's remember there are two ways to push and cajole and encourage explicitly and implicitly or overtly and covertly some of the things that we were talking about earlier I mean that we can change behaviour without people necessarily knowing and in fact their behaviour is informed without them necessarily knowing this is actually a benefit that the electricity sector has there are covert and over mechanisms at play with energy consumption so let's assume that it's either pushing and cajole and encouraging change unknowingly or knowingly to whose responsibility is that for well because we discount the future so massively as individuals each drink can be merry for tomorrow we die burn the hands worth two in a bush we discount the future hugely of course we do we've lived 100,000 years with the possibility of death within weeks the future is a foreign place and a place that we don't consider very much as individuals and therefore we need we need a body to deal with that behaviour in a lot of ways so policy makers for sure perhaps industry or the incentives are slightly in the wrong place but policy makers, yep OK, this one to you Sarah does the behaviour of energy sector leaders need to change first before consumer behaviour can change I think this is always a challenging one there is a big incumbency problem in the energy sector there are multiple companies out there who are benefiting from climate change so it's very hard to convince them to change the reason why it's so important to encourage the forward thinking utilities and encourage their leaders and to help them make money out of this is because that starts a very very positive push which other organisations then can't ignore it's been incredibly interesting to see how GE and Siemens are being reported in the news recently so GE has lost about 30% of their share price Siemens has gained about 12% and Siemens is widely regarded as having pushed much harder in the smarter renewable space they're being punished by the market or rather they're being rewarded by the market GE's being punished by the market and that helps to encourage leaders to push that direction OK, and this for you Marguerite you look around the world I presume to compare yourself to what's happening in other countries so what other countries are pioneering smart grid rollout and how do you think, well if not just how Ireland can learn from those how well do you think you're comparing? We're genuinely right up there with the best of them we get as many people making enquiries of us particularly around the renewable space because that level of penetration of renewables particularly on quite rural networks is something that hasn't been experienced in an awful lot of other countries yet things like self-healing networks and some of the solutions we have in the renewable space other people are really keen to learn from us we're one of the first people to have the kind of level of penetration of renewables and downline switches like that that we have as well in our medium voltage network at the same time there's certainly nobody has the full gam so there's certainly things we can learn from other places so one that we have a bit of learning to do I think is in the area of battery storage and there's certainly trials in New York places like that that we can learn from and particularly I think both Australia and Germany in the context of solar power and some of the things that they did with tariffs which they wouldn't do again given another chance that has caused I suppose a lot of take up of the technology but at great cost so there's things we can certainly learn from other countries but equally we've had many inquiries from people coming to visit us and find out what we're doing so modesty forbids at one level but we are right up there with the best of them Now it's a question coming in for all of our how could you persuade more people to switch to electric vehicles but before you answer that I know from radio programme I present here and we've got lots of people interested in electric vehicles but they seem to have three major things that they have issues with one is the range in which the car can actually go before it needs to be recharged the second is the availability of recharging and the time it takes to recharge the car but the biggest issue particularly is the price and the resale value so what would your solution be to encourage people to switch to EVs so the three things you mentioned price and resale value that's not really that's true that they think that's the case but that's not really the case otherwise it wouldn't sell us to Martins and Porsches and things like that so price is not really a challenge the range anxiety and places where you can recharge this is a real challenge actually and we overvalue loss twice as much as a pleasure of going of equal size so loss is a real challenge for us the downsides are a real challenge for us what's also worse about that is that we're doing that as a frame the only other frame is petrol diesel engines of course and they've been around for 100 years and they're quite good at the moment there was terrific range anxiety in 1896 when the first car was advertised dispensed with a horse it would go two miles an hour and break down very frequently and a handle to crank it so if you think about so it's a terrific challenge the range anxiety needs to be dealt with it's being dealt with at the moment your masters recently they have a 600 mile range car that they're just bringing out that brings me to the other issue that comes up people are afraid of an early movers that if they buy the first type of electric vehicle very quickly a new type will come along which is much better is there one that they've spent a lot of money on redundant? yeah that's okay though because they've already bought it and that's fine right that's okay and some people like to be the early adopters anyway that's kind of okay that's not so much of a challenge but there's something really interesting that you've raised here which is that in terms of understanding people's behaviour and understanding the motivation and how to motivate people's behaviour there is only so far we can go there is a primary there is a primary condition above the behavioural condition which is that is it actually doable in the first place so for instance I can convince someone to stay in their room or I can convince someone to leave their room I can increase motivation to leave their room but I can't increase motivation to leave someone's room if they're in prison if it's physically impossible there is a challenge with EVs around range anxiety and around recharging and I can only do so much to kind of affect that at the moment those things are real they loom large there's no magic tricks around that it is changing it will change the uptake will be quite large when we see it so there's there's not a magic answer to that I'm afraid I'm going to come to the end of this session with a very good question which I think only Marguerite you're in a position to answer because I think our visitors from outside Ireland will probably be baffled by this particular question but how do we encourage consumers to engage with smart metering particularly when we consider the ferroire of a water metering over the last few years I think there could be multiple PhDs in that one but I think it's back to that idea of the benefit and the choice and if you can see benefits particularly with your neighbours it's not very complicated you get a benefit out of it and it's not enforced or it's not forced on people then hopefully people will engage with it and we certainly see huge benefits in the distribution system if people would give us access to that data it would reduce costs overall because we'd be able to run a much tighter system but there's a challenge in it particularly because of that engagement but hopefully because we've always had electricity meters we won't end up there Okay, Sarah Bell, Marguerite Serres and Oliver Payne thank you all very much for being with us this morning now everybody this concludes our first session of the conference leads us into a coffee break and we'll be back in a few minutes around the hall including the smart networks display over the break we're inviting you to take part in another slide all poll so what's the most important for you in the low carbon future is it A to save the planet B to save money C as little disruption to my routine as possible D no complicated technology or E cutting edge digital solutions please be back by half past 11 in your seats for the next session thank you very much