One of the greatest challenges for a Net Zero Carbon future is making the most out of our clean energy sources.

More often than not, this requires us to have the ability to shift our electricity demands to those times of day when clean power is plentiful – this is what we call flexibility.

Flexibility is generally seen as a way of improving the balancing of our demand for energy with renewables’ output. The more renewables we use, the less carbon emissions we produce, and the closer we get to achieving our ambitious Net Zero targets.

So how do we achieve that flexibility?

Energy demand goes hand in hand with what people do, so our search for flexibility necessarily starts by looking at the rhythms of everyday life.

Essentially, if we want to change energy demand, we need to change either what people do or the way they do it.

But how exactly does demand for electricity relate to what people do on a day-to-day basis?

Our everyday life – what we do at home, at work, at school, when moving around – and its relation to energy demand is rather complex. As part of our work as energy researchers, we have introduced fresh approaches to thinking about the social-temporal organisation of energy demand. We also try to understand what these mean in terms of the ‘different flexibilities’ across different temporal scales and dimensions of everyday life such as the timing of people’s activities while at home, their travels, the demand for electricity, and the cost of providing said electricity.

Perhaps it is best to just dive right in and start exploring how these patterns of human activity translate into demand for energy. Here we share with you some tools that hopefully will allow you to visualise more easily these complex relations, and the ways in which we can increase our ability to be flexible.