Informing Energy Choices Using Ubiquitous Sensing

There is little doubt we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change. There is however, a disconnect between human activities and impact in energy and carbon externality. By monitoring energy use for a specific human activity, Ubicomp technologies may help us uncover this hidden impact. Our aim is to bring Computer Science, Economics, Carbon Profiling and Sociology together to explore the feasibility of identifying and informing people of 'critical moments in their daily activities that have carbon impact', so they can individually and collectively make savings. We will work with an actual community using a novel set of technological and cultural probes, involving embedded sensors, smartphone applications, aggregated 'crowdsourced' data and ethnographic field work, to deliver a richer understanding of behaviour that leads to lower carbon lifestyles, backed up by experimental data showing the impact of our intervention feeding this back to end-users. Our software, high level results, algorithms and models will be placed into the public domain and communicated through our programme of engagement, such as developing teaching materials with local schools.Our hypothesis is people are unaware of their direct and indirect energy usage and its associated climate change impact: this is a barrier to understanding how to achieve 'low carbon living' personally, as communities. During a 2 year feasibility study our objectives are to:1. Gather baseline data about energy use and associated carbon footprint that is personally attributable;2. Develop real-time models of financial and environmental tradeoffs for identifing opportunities for savings;3. Communicate opportunities for making savings back to individuals, enabling greater awareness and making it easy to chart the effect of household 'energy related experiments';4. Provide methods for comparing the usage against others in one's social network i) as an incentive, and ii) to raise awareness of low cost opportunities for collective action (such as ride-sharing);5. Create online resources and teaching materials to communicate our findings to a wider population beyond the study group.We have established links with Galloway Carbon Action Project (a community of 2,800) homes who have pledged us support and access to the three communities involved. This is a perfect complement for gathering real world data and findings from end-users and for communicating our findings and having a significant real-world impact. We also have links with local schools who are prepared to help us develop teaching materials, to help us communicate the key lessons to local communities.

Impact is an important part of our project. In 2004 there were approximately 24.7 million households in UK. If we were able to encourage energy savings in only 1% of family homes at an observed lower bound for typical interventions of 5%, then we could save 8.6 million a year collectively (12.4m across 1% of all UK households and 25,836 tonnes of CO2 emissions). This is a conservative assessment given that in 2007, nearly 40% of all UK's emissions (142m tonnes) came from the energy we use to heat, light and power our homes, and emissions associated with personal transport. Our project will have immediate impact for our trial participants - we have been pledged access to 2,800 households participating in the 'Galloway Carbon Action Project' (GCAP). Both in immediate terms to the households participating in our studies, but also more widely as we communicate the results back to the community in question. We aim to communicate this more widely through teaching materials, online resources, and public engagement (see impact plan). We believe there are many possible beneficiaries (especially of the generalisable results of our project): Individuals and households: Greater awareness of what to change to reduce energy use and carbon impact. The public: Greater awareness of what to change to reduce energy use and carbon impact (esp. technology adopters who utilise our open-source software or mobile phone applications.) School children: Improved awareness about carbon footprint impact of their lifestyle and that of their family (who can use their influence on their parents and friends!). Educators: Improve effectiveness of teaching experimental methodology and new way of communicating impact of lifestyle to families (helping meet keystage 4 learning objectives.) Appliance manufacturers: By making power use of market alternatives clear, allowing product differentiation and competition to reduce standby and operating current etc. this can create new ways of stimulating market demand for greener technologies. Policy makers: New data about UK homes and patterns of use. Tools for making it easier to conduct follow up and larger scale studies.