Designing and Evaluating Energy Product-Service Systems for Energy Sector (EPSS) in Liberalized Energy Market: A Case Study in Space Heating Services for Japan Household

Abstract

This paper introduces Energy-Product-Service Systems (EPSS) to overcome the issues in the liberalized energy market. Currently, conventional energy services are highly commoditized, thus eroding their competitiveness in a liberalized energy market. In addition, customer benefits from the current system are hard to analyse, because it is difficult for customers to observe the quality of the results of energy consumption. EPSS incorporates energy sector with other related sectors to design and deliver immediate result of energy usage that suit to customer’s specific needs is expected to provide better performance than current system. However, EPSS service design and implementation involve high risk and performance uncertainties. Therefore, this study proposes a method to design and to evaluate EPSS and compare its performances with energy product/service performance in current system through Simulation-Based Design (SBD). SBD is used to construct EPSS service considering stakeholders’ interest and to evaluate the service performance, by simulating alternative scenarios in order to seek conditions that are expected to fulfil stakeholders’ requirements. In the proposed analysis, three service features, that is, service consumption management, operational system design and electricity supply management are introduced and used to develop EPSS alternative design for space-heating service. Afterwards, customer satisfaction and the company’s benefit for each service scenarios are simulated and compared with the performance of the current system. In this context, EPSS design that includes operational system design and electricity supply management results in better benefit for all stakeholders.