Aging Population Attitudes to Sensor Controlled Home Energy

It is generally accepted that energy saving measures whether at the individual building level or aggregated up to the community level need to be automated in order to maintain a sustained and consistent response to demand reduction. APAtSCHE proposes to look at the technical and social issues surrounding developing and deploying home automation technologies in social housing inhabited by senior citizens. The attitudes of this age group and their willingness to invest in and trust energy saving technology are very important given that the UK population is aging and that this demographic will come to dominate in years to come. These attitudes now and in the future will be shaped by experience, fuel costs as a proportion of domestic budget and established technology prejudices, which APAtSCHE intends to study through monitoring the engagement of novel technology with homeowners.Rising energy prices in the UK have stemmed from shrinking domestic generation capacity, increased reliance on imports and increasing fossil fuel costs along with associated levies; these price rises are passed onto the consumer through energy retailers who face these through an increase in wholesale energy prices. As a consequence, fuel poverty is becoming a real threat to a larger sector of UK society as many household economies are dominated by their energy budgets. How this will increase in the coming years will form part of a study in APAtSCHE used to inform hardware trials of the potential usefulness of energy savings.While domestic energy use is a function of the structure and form of the housing stock, the people who live in the housing drive the demands for energy and by their nature, people exhibit autonomous traits that are governed by their routines. APAtSCHE proposes that a combination of occupancy sensing, self learning environmental monitoring and informative control interfaces has the potential to not only constrain variation in domestic load, but provide the necessary information to quantify its changes with respect to the deployed technology.Presently, the opaque nature of energy consumption is cited as a reason for household inefficiencies as behaviour cannot be related to energy use, while loss of control was often cited as a key concern of domestic energy customers in qualitative studies of energy use. Technologies which highlight constituent elements of the overall domestic load and map these to actual activities of the householder could be seen as a vital bridging step in establishing trust in home automation. Identifying room utilization or occupancy and apportioning its load contribution to an overall meter reading would allow activities in the home to be mapped to a particular level of energy consumption. An existing product, the Energy EGG, already available to the public, forms the hardware basis of this area of research - this uses motion sensing technology to detect when a room is empty and switches off appliances using its patent pending technology which differentiates between a user sitting still and an empty room before it switches appliances off. Giving homeowners the option of allowing loads to be switched off automatically when they are not in the property or in part of the property, can produce a cost saving with no additional effort on their part. One research stream in APAtSCHE is dedicated to improving the measurement of occupancy, studying occupancy variability and quantifying the cost benefit of automating domestic loads on the basis of occupancy. Unifying sensor data with the predicates of household activity and appliance control requires data interchange standards for automated storing, assimilation and analysis which will be developed by APAtSCHE by extending current industry standards, to provide appropriate visualization for automated control development and intuitive and habit forming cues for understanding where and how much energy is being used without it becoming an overhead on householders' daily routine.

A number of different groups will derive both societal and economic benefit from the outcomes of the APAtSCHE research:
*Housing Associations - will be in a more advised position to make their building stock more energy efficient and provide their tenants with additional peace of mind regarding energy bills.
*Charities (e.g. Age Concern) - would be able to provide better informed and sustainable assistance to their clients (beyond just financial help) with ongoing savings in their energy bills while protecting their health, well-being and comfort
*Consumer Groups (e.g. Which? CSE) - would have a more informed perspective on fuel poverty and would be better positioned to advise the public and government on measures to mitigate its onset
*Metering Companies - will be better informed of the communications requirements within the massively heterogeneous UK housing stock, intelligence that can be incorporated into Smart Meters and standards for appliance interoperation
*Energy Retailers - can benefit through adopting the technologies developed as part of APAtSCHE and offer these as energy services both as support to their customers most at risk from fuel poverty and those seeking to adopt more efficient patterns of consumption
*Research Institutes/Consortia - such as EPRI and DERRILab will be able to advise their industry partners such as electrical plant manufacturers, transmission network operators, distribution network operators and generators - of the implications home automation will have on their operations and future plans
*Generation Companies - greater understanding of domestic loads and their variability would allow generation companies to make more accurate forecasts of capacity requirements and assess the extent to which margins can be reduced without compromising security of supply. The removal of needless spinning reserve would both save on generation fuel costs and therefore reduce emissions.
*Standards bodies (IEC) - will have a tested implementation of the extension of the CIM standard down to the Low Voltage network and into the home area network.
*Distribution Network Operators - the increasing penetrations of distributed generation (DG) have presented a challenge to companies in charge of installing and maintaining plant and cabling on the low voltage level. Without adequate estimates of the variability of domestic loads and mechanisms that future Smart Grid technologies could use to constrain them, DNOs may be faced with reversed power flows on sections of network that cannot provide demand to absorb generation, or faced with costly upgrades on underspecified feeders. While APAtSCHE has focused only on the energy use in single buildings, provision is left to scale this up to the feeder level and consequently to the distribution level.
* Devolved Governments - aggregating modelled trends found in the individual building level will inform the devolved governments, such as the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Government, of their future energy policies and housing standards
*Community Groups (e.g. Sustainable Blacon, Fintry, Muswell Hill) - will be empowered through their active involvement in the research process and feedback sessions. This will benefit them directly and, through their networking with Development Trusts and other Community Trust organisations, the wider sector of community asset management.