SPARKY

1
SPARKY

• From Energy Consumers
• to Citizen Prosumers

2
Motivations

• People are passive resource consumers
• Most would like to be green, save money
• But they have no insight into the consequences of
  their actions
• Large companies and policy makers are the
  controlling stakeholders

3
Proposal

• People can become empowered energy
  citizensprosumersby providing information,
  feedback and opportunities to better understand,
  motivate and modulate their behaviour

4
Method

• Support interaction between citizens and their
  environment to motivate changes in resource
  consumption and production behaviour

5
Method - 2

• Create a living lab to experiment on
• Motivating behaviour change
• Asking questions and understanding answers
• Communication and sharing of best-practices
• Focus on electricity
• Incremental roll-out from lab-scale to city-scale

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Scenario
7
Quotations

• I was astounded at the response we got... If you
  give people simple tools and an incentive, they
  will do this.
• Each household doesn't have to do a lot, but if
  this can be scaled up, the savings in investments
  will be huge, and consumers and the environment
  will benefit.
• Over a 20-year period, this could save 70
  billion on spending for power plants and
  infrastructure, and avoid the need to build the
  equivalent of 30 large coal-fired plants.
• - Robert Pratt, Advisor to the American Council
  on Renewable Energy
• Project leader for Pacific Northwest GridWise
  (http//gridwise.pnl.gov/)

8
Infrastructure

• Sensing Electrical usage, Human behaviour,
  Environmental data, Power availability
• Control On/Off, Fine-grained control
• Display and Feedback Web 2.0, Ambient displays,
  Mobile devices
• Power Generation Personal wind, solar and hydro
• Network and Processing

9
Infrastructure - 2
10
Research Issues

• Mechanisms to motivate behaviour change
• Enable citizen science in a complex domain
• Learning about the effects of your actions
• Communicating results to your peers
• Controlling complex home systems

11
Impact

• Increased awareness and efficiency
• Saving resources and money
• Madeira as a green role model
• Empower individuals as citizen prosumers