Web Science Summer School - Internet-Energy interface

I took a few relaxing days off in London to recuperate following the Web Science Summer School (with visits to some rather fine vegetarian restaurants and Ashtanga Yoga London). Having reflected a little on the summer school programme, which was packed full of insightful and interesting talks and conversations, I have quickly put together a list of the ideas it stimulated at the energy-web interface.

Transitions

• Applying socio-technical (or co evolutionary) transition theory to analyse the lessons from the development of the web for energy demand reduction within a smart world/infrastructure.
• Mapping and understanding the implications of potential web failures for resilience of the energy system (today and in a smart world). For example, a socio-technical systems analysis of the Internet related risks to the energy system.
• Could I map where energy related open/web data is now? And envision where it could be in the future?

Ethics

• If there is a second order obligation to seek reconcile ethical objectives with other objectives when designing a systems. How should smart grid designers seek to reconcile privacy vs. energy systems sustainability, security andaffordability?
• What are the implications of life mining including smart grid data?

Public perceptions of the energy system

• Is there value in developing understanding of the current role of the web in the public discourse around energy? For example analysis of page view and edits data on wikipedia of energy related pages, and comparison with analysis of other areas of the web such as user comments on energy related newspaper articles (e.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/22/energy-policy-government-nuclear-wind).

Smart homes

• What insight and inspiration can be drawn from the NoTube project and applied to energy demand reduction within a smart home context? For example:
• Is there value in linking energy consumption to domestic activity log (e.g. not just tv consumed x kwh, but watching prog y consumed x kwh)?
• In the NoTube project the viewing data of friends and family was of much greater interest than the users own data, would there be a similar situation for energy demand data?

Crowdsourcing

• How does the wisdom of friends/crowds approach fit with energy demand reduction?

Law

• Privacy in the IoT (and what the law can do to protect privacy)?
• What are the governance models for the smart grid (as an IoT application)? Or more broadly, what are the governance models for the smart infrastructure that could enable MUSCos (Multi Utility Service Companies) 

Web Science Summer School Notes

All my notes from the excellent, thought provoking and fun Web Science Summer School can be found here.

Morality and the Web (Jeroen van der Hoven) - Web Science Summer School Day 2 am

Can Web Science Motivate New Theories and Methods? Notes on Noshir Contractor's talk Monday pm at WebSci Summer School

Notes (below or download here) from Noshir Contractor's extremely thought provoking talk on Can Web Science Motivate New Theories and Methods - Monday afternoon the Web Science Summer School in Lieden.

Web Science Summer School - Day 1 (Lieden)

Notes (below or download here) from Wendy Hall's excellent overview of the Web Science field - opening the Web Science Summer School in Lieden.

Energy and Complexity: the Way Forward (Oxford)

Yesterday's event on Energy and Complexity (the way forward), organised by my colleagues at Leeds and UKERC, provided a forum for the group of 4 EPSRC projects funded under the energy and complexity call to share and discuss their findings. The focus of the day was to establish the:

• key insights or lessons do these 4 projects offer us – and for whom;
• main challenges in understanding energy systems that we could tackle with the tools of complexity science;
• priority areas for research.

The discussions were both wide ranging and addressed the fundamental foundations of the energy-complexity interface. These discussions having stimulated my thinking at the energy-ICT interface as outlined below.

• Using agile software engineering type methodologies within the design and delivery of projects to reduce energy demand.
• What are the risks to resilience created by smart grid demand response measures?
• How can ICT (e.g. smart meters) provide data to better inform the models of future smart grids?
• What are the implications of the Powering the Nation Report (Energy Savings Trust) for smart home vision?
• What are the visions for Demand 3.0? How does this vision relate to other 3.0 visions (Governance 3.0, Knowledge 3.0, Energy 3.0 etc.)?
• How can ICT support the cascade effect for adoption of energy efficiency measures (i.e. whereby an individual is more likely to adopt if his/her friends, family, peers etc. adopt)?
• How can the data generated by trial smart demand reducing technologies (e.g. smart meter trials) be better analysed (both to develop academic understanding of behaviour and inform policy)?
• How can the design of ICT systems (and other energy demand related disciplines) move away from a mechanistic view of energy consumer behaviour?
• How can agent based models be used to develop understanding of the potential for social network technologies to propagate sustainable behaviours?   

Energy and Smart Cities

I am also starting to think about the interface between the energy and smart cities research areas. I think this could be a really exciting interface to explore as urbanisation rapidly continues the smart city - based around a city-scale pervasive ICT infrastructure - could be key to addressing the major sustainability, social and economic challenges faced over to the coming decades. Or at least the smart city will form a key component of the research and policy agenda. A couple of interesting examples within an energy and sustainability context that immediately occur to me are outlined below.

·      The development of urban smart grids, incorporating ICT (e.g. sensors, applications and tools) to monitor and control the bi-directional flow of energy between generators and users, is expected to enable the integration of renewables and the radical reduction of energy demand;

·      The emergence of smart buildings and transport systems, is expected to both make energy consumption more visible to users (and hence stimulate changes in consumption behaviours) and enable automatic management of energy consumption.

There has been considerable thinking on what constitutes a smart city (although the agenda seems to somewhat be directed by commercial interests – e.g. http://www.arup.com/Publications/Smart_Cities.aspx and http://www.theclimategroup.org/publications/2011/11/29/information-marketplaces-the-new-economics-of-cities/), but it seems to me much less into how this might actually facilitate the transition to low (or at least lower) carbon cities.

As a means of starting to bridge this gap, between smart and low carbon cities, I am offering a full PhD project to 2012 intake for Doctoral Training Centre in Low Carbon Technologies (at the University of Leeds). Hopefully, if a student signs up for the project, this will provide the opportunity to explore the integration of low carbon technologies into a smart city infrastructure. Currently I am thinking that a PhD project could explore the integration of Smart City infrastructure with technologies for:

·      Generating low carbon energy - e.g. integration of micro-renewables (solar, wind, heat pumps etc.) into new and existing building stocks;

·      Reducing energy demand - e.g. advances in materials for increasing the energy efficiency of buildings, or novel technologies that reduce the energy intensity of urban transport;

·      Storing energy - e.g. household and community scale storage of electricity and heat (to balance supply and demand).

Within the broader areas I outlined above it would be interesting to address research questions (such as those presented below) that require the integration of perspectives from across a broad spectrum of disciplines (e.g. ICT, web science, behavioural psychology, business models in digital economy and energy technologies).

·      What is the potential for energy demand reduction from combining adoption of novel materials (to improve the energy efficiency of buildings) with smart infrastructure that promotes changes in the behaviour of building occupants?

·      What are the ethical and privacy issues associated with the implementation of city-scale smart grids, given that associating energy use information with other data streams could be used to reverse engineer detailed lifestyle information?

·      How could smart city infrastructure enable the uptake of micro-renewables and energy storage technologies?

·      How would a smart city change the barriers and opportunities for energy demand reduction and decarbonisation of energy supply?

·      How could the design of smart city infrastructure influence requirements for low carbon technologies and vice versa?