Venue: C1.060

Do Spot-Price Contracts Shave Off Residential Electricity Demand Peaks? Findings from MSc Theses and Idea for Project

Abstract:

Spot-price (dynamic) electricity contracts pass the hourly wholesale price through to households, rather than charging a single fixed or two-tier rate, so the price a household pays varies with real-time supply and demand. The EU's 2019 Clean Energy Package requires electricity suppliers to offer such a contract, on the rationale that exposing households to real-time prices gives them an incentive to shift demand away from expensive, scarce hours toward cheap, abundant ones.

This talk asks whether that demand-shifting actually happens, and whether it grows once the price signal is no longer small. The first part reports findings from MSc thesis work using Dutch smart-meter data and an hourly difference-in-differences design that compares households switching from fixed to spot-price contracts against those who remain on fixed contracts, estimating the effect of switching on demand hour by hour. The second part presents the idea for a future research project (with some preliminary results): What happens when the price signal becomes large? Most Norwegian households were already on spot contracts through the winter 2021-22 price spike, when weekday winter wholesale prices roughly tripled relative to the prior winter. This setting allows to check whether load shifting grows once the monetary incentive to shift is no longer minor.

Venue: TU Delft Campus Spui, The Hague

We are happy to invite you to the 4th international Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations (PHTR) conference, to be held in person at TU Delft's Campus Spui in The Hague (the Netherlands), on September 21-23, 2026.

Emerging technologies can't avoid being entangled with world-consequential events that raise questions about how humans relate to one another, their conflicts, and their collective potential to overcome current crises. Therefore, this edition of PHTR aims to highlight the collective dimension of seemingly individual human-technology relations by revealing the world that is always present within them—politically, culturally, environmentally, and otherwise.

Although originally grounded in philosophy and design, we invite submissions from different disciplines, as long as they address the conference theme. Potential submission themes include:
· Politics and power in Human-Technology-World (H-T-W) relations
· Designing for relationality
· Social, cultural, and historical embeddedness of H-T-W relations
· Methodological contributions
· The role of Empirical Philosophy in studying H-T-W relations
· Disciplinary and domain applications

Submission formats include individual paper presentations, design and multimedia contributions (e.g., pictorials, artifact-based provocations), panels, and interactive sessions. For details, guidelines, and abstract submission, see the CfP: www.aanmelder.nl/phtr26/call-for-papers
Deadline for all submissions: March 20, 2026.

The keynote speakers include Helen Hester (University of West London), Elisa Giaccardi (Politecnico di Milano), and Peter-Paul Verbeek (UvA/KNAW). After the conference, all participants are invited to submit their work to the free diamond open-access Journal of Human-Technology Relations, companion journal to PHTR. The conference is chaired by Olya Kudina (TU Delft) and co-organized by an interdisciplinary committee of philosophers, designers, and computer scientists. For more information: www.aanmelder.nl/phtr26/home

Venue: TU Delft Campus Spui, The Hague

We are happy to invite you to the 4th international Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations (PHTR) conference, to be held in person at TU Delft's Campus Spui in The Hague (the Netherlands), on September 21-23, 2026.

Emerging technologies can't avoid being entangled with world-consequential events that raise questions about how humans relate to one another, their conflicts, and their collective potential to overcome current crises. Therefore, this edition of PHTR aims to highlight the collective dimension of seemingly individual human-technology relations by revealing the world that is always present within them—politically, culturally, environmentally, and otherwise.

Although originally grounded in philosophy and design, we invite submissions from different disciplines, as long as they address the conference theme. Potential submission themes include:
· Politics and power in Human-Technology-World (H-T-W) relations
· Designing for relationality
· Social, cultural, and historical embeddedness of H-T-W relations
· Methodological contributions
· The role of Empirical Philosophy in studying H-T-W relations
· Disciplinary and domain applications

Submission formats include individual paper presentations, design and multimedia contributions (e.g., pictorials, artifact-based provocations), panels, and interactive sessions. For details, guidelines, and abstract submission, see the CfP: www.aanmelder.nl/phtr26/call-for-papers
Deadline for all submissions: March 20, 2026.

The keynote speakers include Helen Hester (University of West London), Elisa Giaccardi (Politecnico di Milano), and Peter-Paul Verbeek (UvA/KNAW). After the conference, all participants are invited to submit their work to the free diamond open-access Journal of Human-Technology Relations, companion journal to PHTR. The conference is chaired by Olya Kudina (TU Delft) and co-organized by an interdisciplinary committee of philosophers, designers, and computer scientists. For more information: www.aanmelder.nl/phtr26/home

Venue: TU Delft Campus Spui, The Hague

We are happy to invite you to the 4th international Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations (PHTR) conference, to be held in person at TU Delft's Campus Spui in The Hague (the Netherlands), on September 21-23, 2026.

Emerging technologies can't avoid being entangled with world-consequential events that raise questions about how humans relate to one another, their conflicts, and their collective potential to overcome current crises. Therefore, this edition of PHTR aims to highlight the collective dimension of seemingly individual human-technology relations by revealing the world that is always present within them—politically, culturally, environmentally, and otherwise.

Although originally grounded in philosophy and design, we invite submissions from different disciplines, as long as they address the conference theme. Potential submission themes include:
· Politics and power in Human-Technology-World (H-T-W) relations
· Designing for relationality
· Social, cultural, and historical embeddedness of H-T-W relations
· Methodological contributions
· The role of Empirical Philosophy in studying H-T-W relations
· Disciplinary and domain applications

Submission formats include individual paper presentations, design and multimedia contributions (e.g., pictorials, artifact-based provocations), panels, and interactive sessions. For details, guidelines, and abstract submission, see the CfP: www.aanmelder.nl/phtr26/call-for-papers
Deadline for all submissions: March 20, 2026.

The keynote speakers include Helen Hester (University of West London), Elisa Giaccardi (Politecnico di Milano), and Peter-Paul Verbeek (UvA/KNAW). After the conference, all participants are invited to submit their work to the free diamond open-access Journal of Human-Technology Relations, companion journal to PHTR. The conference is chaired by Olya Kudina (TU Delft) and co-organized by an interdisciplinary committee of philosophers, designers, and computer scientists. For more information: www.aanmelder.nl/phtr26/home

Category theory in Mech design, an application of AI in research

We formalize, in Lean 4/Mathlib, an argument that Myerson's (1981) Revenue Equivalence Theorem, stating that all regular auctions have the same expected payment for the seller, and Mirrlees's (1971) Taxation Principle, stating that any incentive compatible allocation that is possible in his model can be implemented with an appropriately chosen, non-linear tax schedule, are actually instances of a single categorical structure, a fully faithful adjunction between the payment rules and the allocations. In essence, the result shows that incentive compatible allocations (consumption and taxes in Mirrlees, and the ad-interim chance of winning in Myerson) have a one-to-one relation to the tariffs (marginal taxes in Mirrlees, slope of the expected payments in Myerson).

Methodologically, the project has an interesting shape. I am not fluent in category theory, nor in Lean 4/Mathlib, so I needed help. In this case, there are three separates tools that are crucial for this way of working: the model (LLM) as translator, producing Lean terms and searching Mathlib; the Lean kernel as an incorruptible but domain-blind adjudicator of whether a proof proves the stated theorem ( a very harsh halucination stopper); and an explicit harness with rules, procedures, progress tracking to ensure that the human can see that the LLM is not taking short cuts or deviating from plan.