Enabling consumers to access smart, low carbon and renewable home energy is vital for the UK’s energy transition.

However, Net Zero solutions need to work for everyone to reach our targets, and the pace and scale of change will require more change to homes than ever. This requires that disabled consumers are not excluded from products or services or adversely impacted.

There are currently 13.3 million people living with disabilities in the UK including visual (blind and partially sighted), mobility (paralysis, deftness, cerebral palsy, dexterity), neurodiverse (ADHD, autism, dyspraxia, dyslexia), hearing (deaf and hard of hearing), mental health (anxiety, depression bipolar) and age related (frailties that occur naturally with age).

However, despite this, most existing and new energy products and services (for example home heating controls, energy apps or EV charging) are not designed with these consumers in mind, often presenting significant accessibility and usability barriers. Even accessing or being able to read their electricity meter can be a struggle for people with mobility issues.

Furthermore, access to energy can often be more important to disabled consumers, many of whom spend more time in the home and rely on heating and electricity for equipment vital to their health.

This report focuses on one part of this design process – testing or trialling new energy products and services before they are launched. It has been put together by Energy Systems Catapult as part of the Fair Futures programme, and the Research Institute for Disabled Consumers, who between them have extensive experience of running trials of energy products and services and conducting research with disabled consumers. This project is supported by the Energy Redress Fund (administered by the Energy Savings Trust).

Key points

Trialling with Disabled Consumers: Enabling energy innovation to be inclusive focuses on one part of the innovation design process – testing or trialling new energy products and services before they are launched.

In order to ensure inclusivity going forward, new energy products and services need to be designed with disabled consumers in mind. The best way to ensure everybody’s needs are considered, and to enable innovators to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, is to include as many people with different needs as  possible throughout the whole design process: from early exploration through to design, development and testing.

The report covers:

• The Design Process
• Running research trials with disabled energy consumers
• Planning your energy research trial
• Making sure your energy product is ready to trial
• Recruiting disabled energy consumers
• Running the Trial
• Stages of product and service use to explore
• Trial Research Methods
• Wrapping up a trial