Developing new concepts for B2B2C energy flexibility using service design approach

Local energy flexibility marketplaces and automated trading expand access to smaller-scale energy flexibilities, enabling direct participation of consumers and SMEs with local ownership, management, and activation of flexible assets. This paper applies a service design process to establish hypotheses for user needs and solutions for further testing and iteration. User interviews and segmentation leads to the introduction of four service concepts from limited to advanced assets and driven by analytics or alerts. Each concept is detailed with user journeys, service blueprints linking user experience to technical implementation, flow diagrams and mock user interfaces. The active role of the flexibility seller is emphasized, highlighting challenges. Most users’ primary benefit needs to be financial, ahead of environmental. However, energy consumption depends on various factors making estimation, communication, and prediction of benefits hard. Energy literacy varies, as does the desire for automation vs. transparency and control. Users likely need high trust in the service provider. The challenge is to create a transparent, user-controlled system that operates automatically in the background. The control/transparency vs automation/invisibility is a dichotomy inherent to the service. When developing new services there is a need to address concerns about costs exceeding benefits, uncertainties faced by users and long-term effects.