Active demand by households and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is still not widely adopted. While active demand has a long-standing tradition in industry, other potential remains largely untapped. Although a variety of interventions aimed at "activating” energy end users have been piloted in smart grid projects, a consistent and integrated view on how to incentivize consumers to change their behavior is still lacking. From an energy policy perspective, it is important to understand key enabling factors that contribute to active demand in order to leverage those factors through targeted policy interventions. From a research and innovation policy perspective, social innovations and involving end users in the innovation process are important fostering factors to overcome the barriers in bringing smart grid technologies from technological readiness to system wide deployment.

The webinar covered key results, best practice examples, and recommendations for fostering energy end user involvement from the S3C project, ISGAN Annex7, and beyond. Presentations were followed by an interactive question and answer session with the audience.

Erik Laes is a chemical engineer and holds additional degrees in philosophy and environmental sciences. In 2006, he obtained a PhD in engineering sciences. As a researcher at SCK•CEN (1999-2009), he worked on several projects involving sustainability appraisal, participatory technology assessment and scenario development. In July 2009, he joined VITO in the Transition, Energy and Environment unit, where he is involved in projects concerning scenario analysis, sustainability evaluation of energy technology, transition management and smart grids/smart energy users. In the Smart Consumer, Smart Customer, Smart Citizen project, he acted as project coordinator.

Ludwig Karg graduated with a master (Dipl. Inf. univ.) in Computer Sciences at the Technical University of Munich (1981). He gained practical experience in software engineering and held German and international positions in Intel Corp. for multimedia and network products. He is Managing Director of B.A.U.M. Consult GmbH (since 1993) and Chairman of INEM (International Network of Environmental Management). Mr. Karg led various national and international research and development projects on sustainability, renewable energy usage, smart grids and energy storage. In the Smart Consumer, Smart Customer, Smart Citizen project, he acted as senior project manager.

Klaus Kubeczko is senior expert adviser at the Austrian Institute of Technology in the Innovation Systems Department. He is an electrical engineer and holds a PhD in Socio-Economics. He is involved in RTI-policy making processes and long-term strategic research agenda setting on smart grids and low carbon cities. He is operating agent of ISGAN-Annex 7 Smart Grids Transitions and coordinator of the ERA-Net Smart Grid Plus project ReFlex.