Visualization for Personal Energy Analytics

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Energy efficiency in buildings is a low-cost, effective way to reduce carbon pollution while protecting citizens and businesses from energy rate hikes, reducing energy poverty and improving health and productivity. Simply improving building science is insufficient, however: in particular, residential energy use is predicted to rise at twice the rate of population growth, highlighting the critical role of the inhabitant in reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. For this reason energy providers have targeted awareness and behaviour change as important goals in conservation strategies and are actively exploring the use of enriched feedback and reports to improve residential energy consumption patterns. Studies show that while such feedback is useful the results are still less than desired: in particular a lack of actionable knowledge decouples people's energy use from the impact of their everyday activities. This highlights the problem that while we have increasing access to rich and timely data in a range of reporting tools, we still know very little about how to design, situate and integrate them in daily life to support people in making more efficient energy use decisions. Barriers still exist in practice for people to fully understand their energy data and related impact, mostly due to the lack of contextual information related to what the householder was doing at the time of consumption. Ecotagious Ltd. uses disaggregation algorithms to identify energy consumption by appliance in aggregate: that is, delivered to the householder in periodic reports (energy bill). The company is interested in extending these reports to include more activity context to help households understand their energy consumption data and the related behaviour. In this Engage project, we will focus on designing and developing interactive visualization approaches that can support residential consumers to better understand household energy use assisted by the context from load desegregation, external conditions and personal activity.