For many years, community energy projects have strived to use local energy within local communities; it sounds simple but it can be challenging.

The ACCESS project on the Island of Mull (funded by Local Energy Scotland) in 2015 sought to align local hydro generation with 100 households using electric storage heating and hot water. The matching of ‘volatile’ renewable energy with ’flexible’ storage heating was based on the simple premise that ‘storage heaters don’t care when they charge’.

• Connected Response technology can support such projects in several ways including:
  Providing our heating optimisation technology to automatically match heating and hot water with locally available renewable energy. This also frees households from the shackles of night-charging tariffs.
• Using our Consumer Access Device (CAD) to read the consumer’s smart meter in real time and enable the project to credit them for successfully optimising loads (e.g. washing machine, tumble dryer) with local generation.

This approach can deliver community benefits and reduce energy costs for individual households.