When it comes to energy, you want to be sure you’re making choices that are right for you, your family and your community. But it’s difficult to know what to do when there are so many choices. Should you get an electric vehicle? What are the benefits of replacing your hot water system? Could you save money by adding solar panels to your roof?
Sans-limites is a tool to help guide you on your energy journey. Explore your options and find our what works for your lifestyle and budget.
A major part of successfully achieving a global energy transition is ensuring significant consumer participation through the uptake of distributed energy resources (DER), including solar PV, battery storage and electric vehicles. DER uptake is currently obstructed by the cost and complexity of acquiring and benefitting from DER.
BSGIP is working to address this by providing simple tools to calculate the benefits of DER uptake for households and communities, and how these arise. These tools aim to unlock the ability for consumers to understand and benefit from DER, helping to accelerate decarbonisation without needing to become experts in the complex energy system.
The aim of the Sans-Limites project was to build a tool to help the general population answer their questions about costs and benefits of acquiring DER. The tool allows the user to input various scenarios and experiment with different options to understand their implications. These include:
- Home owner or renter
- Apartment or house
- Number of occupants
- Home use pattern
- Various configurations of solar panels
- Home batteries
- Gas or electric hot water
- Fuel or electric vehicles
- Electricity and hot water tariffs
The tool shows a visual representation of the impacts of different choices, with a narrative explaining the results and providing links to further information and tools.
BSGIP took a strategic design decision to produce an indicative, informative tool based on rigorous data and modelling rather than a personalised calculator, as there are many existing consumer calculators and the gap identified was in increasing consumer understanding of options, costs and benefits, and how these arise. We hope people will experiment with different scenarios and configurations, observe the impacts on finances, emissions and lifestyle, and feel empowered to make informed decisions about their own participation in the global energy transition.