Disaggregating and incentivising productive household electricity demand

The Demand Stimulation Initiative is an R&D project focused on enabling targeted electricity tariffs for specific household uses, starting with electric cooking and e-mobility charging.

In many households, the electricity meter records total electricity consumption. It does not show how much electricity was used for cooking, charging an electric motorcycle, lighting, refrigeration, entertainment, or other needs. This creates a challenge for tariff design. If a utility or regulator wants to introduce a special tariff, credit, or rebate for electric cooking or e-mobility, there must first be a reliable way to identify and verify the electricity used for that purpose within the household.

DSI is designed to create a technical pathway for doing this without requiring immediate replacement of the entire household metering system.

DSI is borne from Kenya’s tariff review process. As the country considers how electricity tariffs should evolve, there is an opportunity to move beyond broad customer categories and begin testing how tariffs can support specific household uses of electricity.

This is needed now because electric cooking and e-mobility are emerging as important new household loads. They can help grow electricity demand, improve utility revenues, support cleaner cooking and transport, and make better use of the electricity system. However, they can only be supported through targeted tariffs if their electricity use can be identified and verified.

Most household meters in Kenya record total electricity consumption. They do not show whether electricity was used for cooking, charging an electric motorcycle, lighting, refrigeration, or other needs. This makes it difficult to apply a tariff, credit, rebate, or token adjustment to a specific use of electricity inside the household.

The challenge is greater in rural and low-income urban areas, where household electricity demand is often low and full smart-meter deployment may be difficult to justify. These are also the customer segments where targeted support for electric cooking and e-mobility could have significant impact.

DSI addresses this gap by exploring how appliance-level data, household meters, utilities, regulators, manufacturers, and tariff systems can work together.

The project therefore asks:

How can demand of interest, such as electric cooking and e-mobility, be identified, verified, and supported through targeted household tariffs during a tariff reform process, such as that in Kenya, without introducing incompatibility with the existing household metering infrastructure?

Our approach is to develop and test a practical system that makes specific household electricity uses visible and tariff-ready. The first focus is electric cooking and e-mobility charging.

The proposed pathway combines appliance-level measurement with a clip-on telemetry unit located near the household meter. Appliance meters record electricity used by approved appliances, while the clip-on unit collects this information, links it to the household electricity account, checks it against total household consumption where possible, and sends verified data to a tariff-facing platform.

This creates a pathway for applying targeted tariffs, credits, or rebates without requiring immediate replacement of existing household meters.

• Develop a practical technical solution for targeted household tariffs.
• Enable measurement of specific household electricity uses.
• Support electricity demand growth from electric cooking and e-mobility.
• Improve utility visibility of emerging household loads.
• Prepare the model for piloting, adoption, and scale-up.

DSI is not only about increasing electricity use. It is about making new household demand measurable, verifiable, and usable for targeted tariff application.

For utilities, DSI creates a pathway to grow electricity demand while managing network constraints, infrastructure costs, and the operational impacts of new household loads.

For customers, it creates the possibility of targeted tariffs, credits, or rebates for beneficial electricity uses such as electric cooking and e-mobility charging.

For manufacturers, it creates a pathway for appliances and equipment to support tariff eligibility through verified usage data. However, DSI recognises that this capability should not significantly increase the cost of appliances for price-sensitive customers. If the added metering or telemetry cost is passed directly to customers, it could raise asset acquisition prices and slow adoption.