The Participation Economy.
Moving Energy to a community model, where the value is shared with householders.
Shared Value
I’m very positive for the future of energy as the latest sector to shift towards a Participation Economy. I believe the scene is set for a new trend where Energy sector revenue is shared with households if their EVs, home batteries or heat pumps are enabled to make money in the energy market directly.
Homes are now able to share in the economics of energy generation and consumption; they can make money by participating in the process of rationing out our new, cleaner but intermittent sustainable energy.
This process allows energy to be used more efficiently without ever impacting on their comfort or convenience.
The Participation Economy
The Participation economy is already visible elsewhere. JustPark helps householders earn from an empty driveway, Turo and Hiyacar let private owners generate income from cars that would otherwise sit idle, and Airbnb made it normal for people to earn from spare rooms or underused homes.
For energy there it is no longer just about spare assets earning money, but households participating in infrastructure itself; it is exciting because it is an even more essential system.
Out with the Old, In with the New
Countries are now moving beyond the aging carbon intensive energy system and hopefully reducing its pollutants, health and energy security impacts too. This centrally run system was not designed for sharing. Households have always had to pay into that system, with little agency over the service they get back. Think no further than the current cost of sweating our utility infrastructure since the 1980s privatisations.
Today statistics show cleaner renewable generation is growing fast across energy networks worldwide. The major intended upside of reducing Co2 emissions is now coupled with an emerging economic model that shares value with the consumer.
Energy supply is now volatile and that is the reason the opportunity for households to participate directly in the energy market exists. When the sun shines and the wind blows there is an abundance of clean renewable energy to power our businesses and our homes. But on still, cloudy days our grids fall back on supplementing nuclear energy by burning more fossil fuels.
To make intermittent renewable energy work, it must use up its excess electricity on some days and ration what there is to go around on others. This shows up in daily price fluctuation linked to electricity supply and demand; wholesale prices of electricity can change like the wind.
With the growing number of large electrical devices in our homes, there are a mix of simple and complex participation opportunities happening daily. On average having an EV doubles the electrical consumption for an average sized UK house. Moving that demand to the night time when businesses are closed and people are in bed is one shift the market is willing to pay participating households to commit to. When there is excess energy on the grid on a sunny summer day, people can actually get paid for charging their cars!
A new kind of energy network is emerging; it is less centralised, more distributed and local, and within it, national and regional scale energy works hand in hand with home-scale energy devices to provide our electricity. As a result, a shared economic model is starting up, where people get paid if their EVs, batteries and heat pumps are used by the grid as power infrastructure. AI powered software is assisting with the complexities of home energy needs and energy market participation. This co-creation of value is the foundation of big changes in our energy system.
As we know, businesses and homes put a significant load on our energy infrastructure, that can be most clearly seen in the energy markets that must precisely balance demand and supply. At breakfast time, during the working day and through into the early evening as people return home and switch things on it is not uncommon for the thirty-minute pricing intervals of energy to hit 30 or 40 pence per kw/h in the UK. Overnight, when demand is down, but supply may still be up, it is not uncommon for the price to plunge to single digits, and it can even become negative – the grid looking to pay to offload excess energy.
A regulatory shift here in the UK has occurred too. Elexon is the government appointed body responsible for ensuring that the grid stays in balance; that there are no black outs caused by too much or too little electricity (think Portugal and Spain in Summer 2025). They are now overseeing an ambitious shift, whereby new businesses, outside the traditional utility firms with their highly centralised P&Ls can apply for a license to trade energy assets in the market. This is where the innovation is happening.
How does it work?
This innovation is about creating ‘flexibility’ in the electricity grid so that it stays balanced. This happens when for example, a household’s EV participates by moving its charging to a non-critical time. When they do this, people can receive a payment in return for being flexible.
I am a relatively recent convert to an EV myself, since working in this sector. I am extremely happy with the driving experience and the convenience of no longer needing to drive to the petrol station and spend lots of money filling up the tank. But choosing the right EV charger, that complied with legislation but more than that, which was compatible and integrated to the systems providing flexibility revenue was not a given. Neither was it obvious that some chargers would tie me inextricably to a single utility company and their tariffs indefinitely.
I am old enough to have seen bait and switch subscriptions and tariffs across most of my home utilities, so I wanted to be sure that the services I was able to access are energy retailer independent.
Because home car charging is a new thing, there are all sorts of little gotchas, which don’t apply to other areas of life. For example, if I set my charge times manually in my vehicle app, little did I know this would likely be overridden by the scheduling time for charging set by my EV charger app and that I needed to connect them together. This is a little like the TV remote, where all my kids know if they want to change the show that another has set with the sky remote, then they can pick up the LG remote and press the Netflix button and it will override it. It’s just that we don’t know this stuff for car charging - yet.
Why trust and simplicity matter
This type of system requires a high degree of trust. People want trusted professionals to modify their homes for EVs and heat pumps; they still want a comfortable room temperature and a car that drives in the morning once the work is done. They need trusted software systems that will keep all this new kit running properly and in a coordinated way. If they know about it already, they will want the software to earn money for them too from flexibility. All this stuff must just work!
Businesses with the curiosity to find the best solutions for customer experience and operational control, in my view are the best bets for the new energy sector.
They are bringing together specialists across hardware, software and home installation. They are joining up the data and using AI to coordinate the experience so that this system works for us in our homes. If this is done right our comfort and our convenience are not impacted and we share in the economic value on offer.
The Participation Chain
My colleagues and I have termed the management of this complex web of technology and behaviour the “Participation Chain”. The Participation Chain is the connective tissue that makes it all work. At one end of it is a technical control layer, at the other a behavioural interaction, and throughout it requires trust.
At the start of the chain, homes are connecting new energy systems to their houses. Managing the Participation Chain requires a turnkey approach where controls across EVs, batteries and heat pumps are managed by a centralised scheduler.
There are lots of these products to choose from when, for example, you are considering an EV charger for your car or a home battery. Many vendors will want to sell you both those products together. But if you have ever tried connecting your Apple Music library to your Windows laptop, you will have noticed that they do not work together. In fact, they are incompatible. The same is true of the energy kit in your home. If you were to move into a house with a Tesla Powerwall battery, it is not designed to “talk to” other vendors’ hardware. This matters if central scheduling and control is what makes the savings and earns the revenue from flex participation. It matters even more because the technology refresh on a laptop might be four or five years, but for a home battery it is at least ten.
Managing the Participation Chain needs a trust-based ecosystem where many vendors can provide their products without integration problems. Because standards are new and emerging, there are many thousands of EV chargers in homes that are no longer legally compliant with regulations. So knowing that the trust ecosystem has tested for current and emerging standards is important when the price of these devices typically exceeds the price of a top-of-the-range laptop. Trust means being able to swap products in and out of your home whilst everything continues to work together. Trust also means knowing that the system will keep working as the market changes around it.
This way, when the right algorithms are applied, all the technology works nicely together. The consumer does not need a degree in electrical engineering to heat their home, drive their car, minimise their bill and earn money. They can rely on resilient home energy when making significant purchases within a sector experiencing rapid change.
The second step in the Participation Chain is monetisation, and this happens at both a household level and a central flexibility system level. The most important thing for the household is that their vehicles are charged when they need to be, that their homes are at a comfortable temperature of their choosing, and, if they have it, that their home generation and storage from solar and battery are used effectively to minimise their energy bills.
The Participation Chain must provide a simple, trustworthy service that consumers can rely on. If energy is not just as convenient as running water then, for most people, they will not be interested in the upside of getting rewarded and paid for offering the grid their flexibility. They will not be interested in their home becoming a “virtual power plant” for the grid.
At the core, trust interactions are a behavioural outcome that must be earned and sustained over time. From the point of commissioning, the platform establishes a trusted relationship with the customer by getting the fundamentals right: accurate data, clear consent, and a working system that behaves as expected. But that is only the entry point. The real work is in the ongoing interaction loop: shaping when people plug in, how they respond to signals, and whether they see enough value to repeat the behaviour.
Through consistent and transparent interactions — notifications, scheduling, feedback and rewards — the platform creates a sense of reliability and fairness, so the customer understands what is happening and why. Over time, this builds a pattern: plug in at the right moments, allow optimisation, receive value, and trust that it will happen again. The result is not forced participation but aligned behaviour, where the customer, the device and the system are all working in the same direction. That alignment is what turns a connected asset into a participating one.
Why I think this is a genuinely new kind of progress
I believe we are at a remarkable point in the evolution of the energy system, where the mutual co-creation of something new and better is happening between the household and the service providers. I am curious to see how it unfolds and I am grateful to be connected to the work and system changes happening today.
I am no history scholar, but as I understand it, the enclosure of common land resources throughout England in the 1700s, which forced communities to become workers rather than shareholders, helped set up our rather successful but often reductive transactional economy. That the participation economy bucks this trend is an exciting idea. It suggests that, in at least some parts of modern life, people may once again share in the value created by the systems they help make work. In energy, that feels like genuinely new progress.