💡 With simple incentives, we can actively match demand to abundant renewable supply - a potential win-win for reducing curtailment and bringing down bills.
👀 Watch this space for the final analysis and get in touch if you have insights to share.
🔗 www.centrefornetzero.org/papers/mobil...
🔄 In Great Britain there was some evidence of load shifting from periods before and after the event.
💰 And survey responses showed financial incentives far outweigh environmental or civic motivations for taking part.
🏠 Flexibility comes from electrification.
Customers with low carbon technologies - EVs, heat pumps and solar & batteries - exhibited larger responses.
A similar pattern was found for customers on time-of-use tariffs.
💸 Households increased demand when incentivised.
Demand increased significantly when electricity was discounted or free in both Great Britain and Spain.
Doubling the discount from 50% to 100% resulted in roughly double demand turn-up.
⚡🌬️☀️ What happens if households get free electricity when renewables are abundant?
We tested this with 120,000 Octopus Energy consumers in 🇬🇧 & 🇪🇸 - the results are pretty striking 🧵
👐 If you just want to get your hands on a ready-made dataset, explore 10 million synthetic smart meter profiles through our @linuxfoundationeu.bsky.social OpenSynth repository: lfenergy.org/projects/ope...
👩💻 To help users get the most from the model and dataset, we’ve also released a new user guide within the Faraday App, covering best practices, model assumptions, and highlights of Faraday in action to inspire your own experiments.
faraday.centrefornetzero.org
🌏 In our latest tech blog, we explain how Faraday V5 generates locationally aware electricity demand profiles, enabling analysis of how energy use changes across different regions and household characteristics.
medium.com/the-centre-f...
🕵️ Ever wondered what goes on under the hood of our generative AI model?
⚡ Our model, Faraday, generates synthetic, half-hourly, household-level smart meter data that helps researchers and policymakers understand electricity demand - without compromising consumer privacy.
⚡ As electrification increases and extreme weather events become more frequent, understanding how household demand responds, and how flexibility can be deployed across time and location, will be essential to winter resilience.
🔗 Read the full analysis here: www.centrefornetzero.org/news/powerin...
Using @octopusenergyus.bsky.social household data, we found:
1️⃣ An increase in household electricity consumption that was notable, but not unseasonable
2️⃣Smaller and shorter-lived impacts vs. Winter Storm Uri in 2021
3️⃣Flexibility, including pre-heating, could help manage peak system stress
🥶 How does household electricity demand respond to extreme winter temperatures?
🌨️ In our latest piece, we analysed how electricity use in Texas responded during Winter Storm Fern in January 2026 — and what that tells us about managing winter stress in ERCOT.
👉 Our @centrefornetzero.bsky.social and @energysyscat.bsky.social proposal for net zero building metrics can be found on our website: www.centrefornetzero.org/papers/net-z...
👀 Find out more about what government has said here: www.gov.uk/government/c...
💡 Time to rethink building performance.
📣 UK gov has confirmed that reformed Energy Performance Certificates will include a new smart metric to capture microgeneration and flexibility.
💪 Great to see following our campaign with @energysyscat.bsky.social and our cross-industry coalition
🇬🇧 The Warm Homes Plan is a welcome step towards smart, low-carbon tech playing a central role in home upgrades.
⚡🏠 As empirical backing for that shift, our research shows that heat pumps cut carbon ~70%, while solar + batteries can slash bills for fuel-poor households (even below zero in summer).
🚪 How can you get access to Faraday?
Our model is open access. You can sign up directly by visiting faraday.centrefornetzero.org/sign_up
4️⃣ See seasonality.
See how power consumption varies across the year - spring, summer, autumn and winter.
3️⃣ Map regional variation.
Visualise our synthetic version of how typical daily household electricity consumption varies across Great Britain.
2️⃣ Explore household variation.
Quickly explore the data and gain insights into how different types of households consume electricity.
What can you expect from the latest update to the app?
1️⃣ Build your own dataset.
Define custom household types - detached homes with EVs, or terraced homes with solar PV - and generate data for your population.
🚨 We’ve updated the app for Faraday, our open-access generative AI model for synthetic smart meter data.
❓ The latest version includes a dataset builder and a dataset explorer, leveraging the @lfenergy.bsky.social OpenSynth repository
🚪 Want access? Sign up directly - see details & 🔗 in 🧵
New @nber.org paper by myself, @the-scheining.bsky.social, Yixin Sun from @centrefornetzero.bsky.social, & Cohen Simpson. We study the largest field experiment on AI-managed EV charging, showing that it can reduce peak demand, lower costs, and cut emissions without disrupting household routines.
💼 New year, new job?
📢 CNZ is hiring for a new Director of External Affairs to work with our CEO Lucy Yu and the rest of our talented team
👀 We're looking for highly motivated candidates with strong energy, comms & policy creds
📅 Deadline - 12pm, 18th Jan 2026
jobs.lever.co/octoenergy/f...
NEW ANALYSIS: Electric vehicles are entering the mid-transition space starting to replace ICE vehicles.
History shows that shifts like this can happen faster than expected: in the early 20th-century US, horses and mules virtually vanished from roads in under 30 years.
cdn.sanity.io/files/lrxd4j...
Excellent recommendations to make public charging cheaper (for users and the overall system):
Check out CNZ’s detailed research into EV charging demand 👉 www.centrefornetzero.org/research
👏 Congratulations to all those who contributed: @janrosenow.bsky.social, Laurens Speelman, Yuki Numata, Will Atkinson, Andy Hackett, Izzy Woolgar.
🔎 Drawing on research from each organisation, we identify three interlinked priorities for policy-makers:
1️⃣ Accelerating adoption & ensuring affordability
2️⃣ Smart integration into clean electricity systems
3️⃣ Ensuring sustainability across supply chains & new types of mobility
📈 One in five new cars sold last year were electric, with rates accelerating year-on-year. The exponential phase of EV adoption is within reach, but it is not inevitable.
