LED light bulb installation suppresses household evening peak electricity demand: not a lot, but you’ll like it.

On March 11th SERG’s Dr Ben Anderson presented a summary of the Solent Achieving Value through Efficiency (SAVE) project’s LED installation trials at the (virtual) Energy Evaluation Europe: 2021 Conference. The conference, which was spread over 4 mornings to enable participants to join from as many time zones as possible, brought together engineers, researchers and policy/commercial stakeholders form across the energy evaluation sector.

Ben’s paper, which was co-authored with Tom Rushby,  Abubakr Bahaj and Patrick James, highlighted that energy efficiency is a critical component in any strategy to reduce the need for expensive GHG-intensive peak demand generation in the UK and elsewhere and thus reduce the need for capital intensive local distribution network reinforcement. Lighting currently consumes approximately 15% of total electricity consumption in the UK ranging from 6 to 15% for electrically heated and non-electrically heated households respectively and 14% of peak winter load. Increasing lighting efficiency could therefore offer substantial sustained residential demand reduction coinciding with known patterns of (especially) winter peak demand. The paper reported analysis of the large-scale SAVE randomised-controlled trial which tested the effect of LED lightbulb installation on temporal electricity consumption in winter and estimated the consumer and network benefits of doing so.

Watch the presentation:

Further reading:

Anderson, Ben, Rushby, Tom, Bahaj, Abubakr and James, Patrick (2021) The effects of LED light bulb installation on electricity demand in UK households: results of a large n randomised control trial. Energy Evaluation Europe: 2021 Europe Conference: Accelerating the energy transition for all: Evaluation’s role in effective policy making, Online. 10 – 16 Mar 2021.