Exploring EVELIXIA - Understanding Household Choices: Designing the EVELIXIA DCE

by Haute Ecole Spécialisée de Suisse occidentale (HES-SO)

During the last General Assembly in Quimper, a small “task force” that brings together EVELIXIA’s technical experts and Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) and survey specialists was formed. The group’s role is to co-design the DCE and shape a clear, people-friendly questionnaire that will be fielded in all our seven pilot site’s countries. Together, these tools will help us collect the right data to understand what end-users value and how they decide whether to participate in flexibility services.

In plain terms, the DCE will present households with short, realistic contract scenarios for taking part in flexibility with a third party such as a DSO, an aggregator, or a building manager. Each scenario is described by a few attributes with different levels. For example, these attributes might include net electricity bill impact (small vs. larger savings), comfort change (no change, different intensity of change) and up-front equipment needs (none, low, medium). By choosing between scenarios, respondents make trade-offs that reveal how they weigh these aspects.

At our early-October working meeting, we continued refining the design, especially the list of attributes and their levels and discussed how to keep everything as concrete, understandable, and simple as possible. We also considered which underlying technologies to anchor the contract scenarios to, for example, EV charging/discharging and heat-pump control with household thermal storage.

What’s next: we will meet again at the end of October. Ahead of that meeting, the team will circulate a first draft of the questionnaire and illustrative choice scenarios. These materials will help our partners get a clearer picture, so we can continue the discussion to refine and calibrate the DCE. With the first questionnaire draft, we will identify which items are useful, which are missing, and which should be removed. The objective is to ensure we collect the most informative data for our study.