Research project This project focuses on how elderly households can participate in demand response without risking comfort, health or affordability. Through interviews, IHBI Lab experiments, senior personas and vulnerability profiles, it develops practical guidance for older adults as network tariffs and flexibility signals evolve.
As the electricity system requires more flexibility, elderly households may be particularly affected by new tariffs and flexibility signals. The project studies how older adults understand, experience and manage such changes, especially when comfort, health, fixed incomes and digital skills limit adaptation. The aim is senior-friendly guidance and tools for a safer and fairer energy transition.
Sweden’s transition to a fossil-free energy system requires greater demand-side flexibility, but the concrete tariff design is changing. In March 2026, the Swedish Government paused the requirement for all grid companies to introduce effect-based tariffs and asked the Energy Markets Inspectorate to develop a new model. At the same time, effect-based tariffs are still used in parts of the country, and different forms of price signals, flexibility programmes and demand response will remain important for reducing peak demand.
This project focuses specifically on the comfort, health and affordability of elderly households in this changing landscape. Older adults may have limited capacity to shift electricity use because they often need stable indoor temperatures for health reasons, live on fixed or limited incomes and may find it difficult to use digital tools for monitoring prices and controlling appliances. The project therefore examines not only effect-based tariffs as one model, but more broadly how older adults perceive and manage signals for demand-side flexibility.
The project combines semi-structured interviews with controlled experiments in the Intelligent Human-Buildings Interaction Lab at Umeå University. In the lab, elderly participants encounter realistic flexibility and pricing signals in a virtual home environment. Their choices, for example regarding heating, cooking and appliance use, are linked to perceived consequences for indoor climate, comfort and cost. Data are collected on behaviour, experience, stress and comprehensibility.
Based on interviews and experiments, the project develops senior personas and vulnerability profiles showing how different groups of older adults may be affected. A single pensioner with low digital literacy may, for example, have different needs from an elderly couple with stronger digital skills and greater financial margins. The project also uses agent-based scenario modelling to explore how different tariff designs, flexibility signals and support measures may affect older households’ costs, comfort and ability to participate in demand response.
The practical final output is a tailored guide for elderly households. The guide is developed together with older participants, senior organisations, municipal energy and climate advisors and electricity grid actors. It will provide clear, safe and realistic advice that helps older adults adapt their electricity use where possible, without compromising health or necessary indoor comfort.
