Merlin Lauenber, Managing Director of Tibber, explains how residential energy use is mostly passive, but that’s starting to change. With the right tools, everyday devices like EV chargers and heat pumps can adjust automatically based on grid needs, helping balance supply and demand.
By exposing consumers to wholesale energy prices, real-time pricing can encourage load shifting. Instead of consuming whenever it's convenient, smart systems align usage with low-cost during low-carbon hours without constant manual input.
Flexibility doesn’t have to mean building new power plants or installing special meters. It can come from software – connecting to devices that households already own and using automation to shift demand when it matters most.
While the technical ability to provide residential flexibility exists, the regulatory frameworks often don’t support it. Markets still tend to reward large generators and ignore the potential of aggregated, distributed demand-side resources.
Retailers and aggregators can act as intermediaries – translating price signals from the market into actions at the household level. This requires trust, data access and regulatory support to scale.
"Flexibility is not a technology problem anymore. It’s a market and policy problem."
“Consumption has to start following production. Flexibility will be the thing enabling this energy transition. If we don’t flexibilize our consumption, we will likely have to build about four times the renewable generation to cover demand at any time.”
"What we need now is a framework that values distributed flexibility just as much as generation."
“The biggest and most exciting thing is connecting all of your customers’ steerable devices to a virtual power plant and marketing the flexibility on the markets.”
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