What Holds Households Back? Unpacking Household Barriers to Flexibility Provision in the Energy Transition

The literature review is aimed at revealing the barriers mentioned in previous studies, whereas the survey explores how familiar respondents are with demand response, their familiarity with home energy management system and their perceived importance of different barriers categories. Discrete choice experiment is used to estimate the preferences of demand response programs with various design attributes including required technology, informational effort, behavioral modification, participation rules and financial incentive.

The survey results show that 60% of respondents are not very familiar neither with demand response nor with home energy management system. This proves that residential flexibility programs are insufficiently known by the potential participants. After short explanation of demand-side response, the most important barrier category mentioned by the respondents was regulatory and participation related barriers.

This fact is supported by discrete choice experiment results as well: participation rules produce the highest willingness-to-pay estimates of 41.5 euros/ month among non-monetary attributes. Thus, policy design should account for household preferences and perceived participation barriers to support broader consumer engagement in demand-side response programs.