Powering up participation: A guide to making smart energy technology more inclusive

Powering up participation [ 1.5 mb] is our guide to making smart energy technology more inclusive. This expands on our call for more inclusive innovation, providing a resource to help the smart energy sector to put inclusivity at the heart of designing technology and the consumer journey as a whole. The guide shares learnings from usability testing of a smart thermostat and introduces a new interactive tool to support consideration of the variety of compounding barriers that people may face along their consumer journey with smart energy technology.

The guide sits alongside our new report A flexible future [ 2.2 mb], in which we make recommendations for how to ensure the energy flexibility market plays a meaningful role in achieving net zero.

These reports are based on 2 stages of research conducted by Collaborate Research. You can find their research reports here: Barriers to participation in smart home technology [ 0.63 mb] and Barriers to changing energy usage behaviour to participate in domestic energy flexibility [ 1.4 mb].