Opower – the energy efficiency company that motivates users to reduce their energy consumption through peer pressure, have filed for IPO apparently (http://www.utilitydive.com/news/opower-files-for-ipo/226769/). That shows they’ve been very successful at applying their incentivisation techniques to get individuals and groups to reduce their energy consumption. In the US where critical peak pricing is well known, they introduced a new product last September, called ‘Behavioural Demand Response’. You can read about it and watch the video here: http://opower.com/solutions/behavioral-demand-response.
In their video they mention having ‘neighbours’ coming together to reduce their consumption at peak time and a lot about the users ‘analysing’ their usage regularly and getting notified through text/email and motivating each other over social networks.
My point is that, in comparison to their implementation, what we’ve done in ORCHID so far doesn’t seem such a distant reality. Instead of a user-owned agent, Opower is acting as the agent and guiding the users to reduce energy at peak times. If this is working for them (they are filing for IPO and growing) and they are able to nudge their consumers to act in the way they want to, then, this bodes well for more (well-designed) automation. See what ORCHID is doing about this in terms of automated tariff switching, washing machine scheduling, and personalised home heating advice here:
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/360820/
Alan, Alper, Costanza, Enrico, Fischer, J, Ramchurn, Sarvapali, Rodden, T andJennings, N. R. (2014) Mixed-initiative electricity tariff switching for dynamic environments. In, Proc. 13th Int. Conf. on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (In Press).
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/361173/
Costanza, Enrico, Fischer, Joel E, Colley, James A, Rodden, Tom, Ramchurn, Sarvapali and Jennings, Nicholas R. (2014) Doing the laundry with agents: a field trial of a future smart energy system in the home. In, ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2014, Toronto, CA, 26 Apr – 01 May 2014.
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/358965/
Rogers, A., Ghosh, S., Wilcock, R. and Jennings, N. R. (2013) A Scalable Low-Cost Solution to Provide Personalised Home Heating Advice to Households [Best Paper Award BuildSys 2013]. In, 5th ACM Workshop On Embedded Systems For Energy-Efficient Buildings (BuildSys) 8pp.
Comments welcome!