A recent paper describes the CHARM Energy Study in which mobile technology is used to study the impact of social groupfeedback on household energy consumption. It describes the background and rationale behind the study, the technology which supports the study, and the study’s methodology. The work described builds upon similar studies by using mobile technology and on-line feedback to increase the frequency of accurate social group feedback to the participants.
It is planned that all UK homes will have Smart Meters installed by 2020, and the EU Smart Meter market has been predicted to be worth 25 Billion Dollars US in the ten years from 2010 to 2020. Although the emerging UK standard mandates that UK Smart Meters will provide bidirectional communications and support in-house displays, the authors are unaware that there is yet a standard for the type of information that will be displayed to the consumer. If the study shows a real reduction in domestic electricity use resulting from social feedback methods, they hope that they may influence the emerging Smart Meter standard to providefor this means of change.
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