Airing Out the Dirty Laundry

Abstract: A variety of demand side management (DSM) methods are needed to ensure electric grid reliability and to integrate increasing shares of renewable energy sources into electricity networks. To investigate whether communal laundry rooms in Stockholm represent a good candidate for employing DSM to reduce the severity of electricity load peaks, tenants are surveyed on their willingness to temporarily lose some laundry schedule availability during typical peak load hours. Results are generally amenable to restrictions to the morning laundry schedules. Based on survey data and typical EU clothing dryer electricity consumption, calculations are performed on the potential electricity loads which could be shifted from peak to off-peak hours under certain conditions. 39.7% of surveyed tenants indicated that they would be either not impacted at all or only minorly impacted if one hour of laundry availability was restricted during morning electricity peak hours. Further, 53.4% of surveyed tenants reported that their available communal laundry facilities use electronic scheduling and access methods. For this proportion, adjusting existing laundry schedules would be relatively simple and without the need for introducing additional equipment or retrofits. Based on the relatively high level of tenants’ reported willingness to accept changes even when presented no rationale for the added inconvenience of losing schedule availability and the ease of introducing schedule adjustments to greater than half of Stockholm laundry facilities, these results support the introduction of DSM methods in communal laundry facilities in Stockholm apartment buildings. More research is needed before implementation, but initial results are supportive of limiting communal laundry room scheduling availability in order to reduce the severity of consumption peaks in the electricity grid profile.