On the edge of supply: designing renewable energy supply into everyday life

Abstract

With peak oil behind us, nuclear generation capacity dwindling, and increasingly daunting looking carbon emissions targets, we are moving to a world where we must consider transitioning to renewable energy sources. Renewables are time varying and their inherent unpredictability must challenge our everyday assumptions around energy availability-leading, we believe, to an emphasis on 'supply' rather than 'demand'. Using a range of methods including action research, participatory design and technology mediated enquiry, we report on our work in partnership with the community of Tiree as an exemplar of this future. Tiree is the outermost of the Scottish Inner Hebridesa remote island on the edge of the national electricity grid with a precarious grip on energy-here we uncover the role of renewables and the resilience of a community in moving away from traditional energy provision. We offer opportunities for designing ICT to support supply driven practices in this context, and a simple framework for exploiting under and over supply.

Tiree Energy Pulse

“…Through this work [8] it is suggested that the opportunities at a community level for synchronising everyday life with supply are opportunistic exploitation-having mechanisms that can take advantage of energy when it is in plentiful supply and cannot be electrically stored, and collaborative load management where the technologies that help the community to predict and plan for future availability. One of the major themes elicited through a game workshop and refined through physical prototyping [15] was forecasting-presenting the likely future availability of energy.…”

“…This work builds on our prior work [8,10,15] which explored opportunities for designing ICT to support synchronisation with renewable energy supply. This work comprised of series of workshops that took place as a 'technology mediated enquiry' over a period of 8 months, engaging community members on Tiree throughout.…”

“…Ferrario et al[8] explore the energy situation in Tiree more completely, but for context a summary is provided here.…”

Shifting the maturity needle of ICT for Sustainability

“…Examples of research that considers smarter cities and energy infrastructures includes understanding how to manage smart cities [3], decision making in organisations [4] and the challenges of living in situations where energy supply and infrastructure is not guaranteed [5]. Work to develop new taxonomies and frameworks have considered a framework for tackling environmental complexity [6] how to develop sustainable computing and catalyse change at scale, and a framework for assessing future scenarios [7].…”

Taking into Account User Appropriation and Development to Design Energy Consumption Feedback

“…However, these approaches are increasingly criticized for their focus on individual behavior and the underlying assumption that such behavior is rational, technologically driven [18], standardized [5] and, often, to be considered independently of the other system elements with which it interacts [7].…”