4 Things a week: Demand response
All systems go! It’s Climate Action Week and London is buzzing with events - so if you haven’t looked at what’s on, it might not be too late to catch a few things.
Yesterday (Tuesday) I was speaking at at the Environmental Packaging Summit, it was about as dry as it sounds, but we had a lively debate on stage about paper versus plastic and how ultimately everything is about context and, above all, remembering that it’s what’s inside the packaging that is ultimately the important bit.
This week has also seen some exciting launches. And no I’m not going to discuss the Nothing headphone design that has been leaked online other than to say - I actually quite like them.
1. World
I don’t own an electric car, but this sounds exciting to me... This week Octopus Energy & Chinese electric vehicle company BYD EUROPE launched a deal that would mean charging your car is absolutely free. With what they call ‘V2G (vehicle to grid) technology’ it means that the car is essentially a big battery on wheels and when you pull into the driveway and plug it in, the power from the vehicle is drained out and sold to the grid at peak times and charged back up in the middle of the night when costs are low. This not only means you have free power, but that the grid is less reliant on buying electricity from fossil fuels during periods of high demand. Pretty cool right!
This contribution to our effort to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and make the UK electricity system £3-8 billion per year cheaper to run by 2050, is part of something called demand-side response. In its simplest form this is about raising awareness of your household electricity usage and cost, particularly at peak times, encouraging behaviour change that reduces bills and eases the demand. Smart meters are great - although we never got ours to work - but it’s these smart devices such as appliances and EVs that automatically react to activity on the grid that have the potential to make the biggest difference. You can imagine a future where all the things plugged in, in your house, are reacting to electricity pricing and your kettle nudges you to wait 5 mins for that cup of tea so that it can be made using a higher percentage of renewable energy.
Sounds great. But what about if you work nights and you can’t have a shower at 10pm or 6am, or charge your car in the middle of the night when it’s cheap because, well, it’s parked at work? It only works if it works for everyone, so let’s hope that there are ways in which these people can benefit too.
Also - I wish the deal wasn't only on the most ugly of the BYD range.
Oh, and isn't it hilarious how these budget EVs are still rendered in front of luxury houses, like the average luxury home-owner is going to care about saving £650 a year on charging their little runaround.
2. Innovation
I get excited about waste. So excited that I once recorded a podcast about the rubbish bin with my friend Lex Fefagha, but this is actually quite interesting. Greyparrot, an AI enabled analytics company that are on a mission to revolutionise the way waste is sorted and tracked, have just released something called Deepnest. It is an AI-powered platform built for consumer packaged goods brands and design teams that gives feedback on both packaging already in circulation and the design of new packaging before it’s complete.
In most cases right now, the only real way of knowing what happens to your packaging within the recycling stream is to put a tag on it, put it into the stream and see where it goes. Now companies can see how their packaging (or that of another brand on the market) is performing based on years of Greyparrot data and then comparatively test iterations on the design, materials, and labelling before committing to tooling. As a designer - that’s huge. Now I just need an excuse to use it - who wants to work on a packaging project together?
3. Morrama
On the theme of sustainability, I’ve written a few articles lately that I thought I would share incase you missed them:
Sustainable packaging : Myth v's Reality - where I discuss how 'plastic free' solutions can often require more energy and resources and how a hollistic view must be taken on new packaging development.
What on earth is regenerative design? - an exploration into what regenerative design means for designers and whether it's even achievable.
3D printing is going mainstream – let’s make sure it’s sustainable - whilst 3D printing brings opportunities for decentralised manufacture, manufacturing on demand and agile product development, it could also lead to more waste if we aren't careful.
4. Inspiration
The team didn’t have time to get out to 3 Days of Design - the annual design festival in Copenhagen last week, but from what I’ve seen online I already have a favourite object. It has to be the Shrinx lounge chair by Boris Berlin for +Halle. A foam-free chair, the woven textile is wrapped over a steel frame and then shrunk to create the tension needed to support the sitter. Its translucent nature offers a lightness that I absolutely love. It's not actually new, I think it was released last year, but it's new to me and it's beautiful.
If you want to join the conversations, email us to 4things@morrama.com.
My '4 things' will be back at the end of next week.
Jo, and the Team x
