More transparency on personal energy consumption is needed — with Open Data
Around 90 participants came together mid February in Brugg during the Energy Data Hackdays. The goal of the event was to improve the public understanding of energy and to work on solutions that contribute to improving the energy efficiency in Switzerland. More than 20 challenges were presented, many of them came from the industry directly. Some datasets were provided by energy companies, whereas other challenges included the research and consolidation of data. A good starting point was the open energy data list put together by the event organizers. The list can be found here.
Participants worked on diverse projects such as photovoltaic diagnosis, charging station location planning, renewal planning and building passport. I personally worked on the “What is Watt?” challenge. The aim of this challenge was to create a tool to compare the energy consumption of several everyday devices. Usage times differ greatly between devices: a toaster, for example, typically runs for 5 minutes whereas light may be turned on for several hours. Therefore, the basis for the comparison is the amount of energy consumed during a typical use of the product. With 150 Google searches we could, for example, toast a bread with the Kitchen Aid toaster for 2 minutes.
Why is comparison needed?
We think that most people find it difficult to develop an intuition for the energy consumption of their individual devices. At regular intervals, total energy consumption figures are made available via our electricity bill. But unless the customer has a smart metering system installed, it is currently not easily possible to analyze these numbers more thoroughly. Which device consumes most energy? Which device uses more energy than it should? Which device was accidentally left on? All these are questions which most of us are currently are not able to answer.
Energy labels should assist consumers in choosing their electrical devices based on their energy consumption. They are, however, not very transparent. Let’s for example look at the widely-used Energy Union energy label: imagine that we can choose between a hairdryer with energy efficiency A that costs half the price of a hairdryer with energy efficiency A+++. How should we choose between them? Just from these class specifications, there is no way of knowing how much more energy the device with energy efficiency A consumes compared to the one with energy efficiency A+++. Thus the customer should be able to compare the energy consumption of their devices on a more transparent basis.
Which problems did we encounter?
Finding energy consumption data for everyday devices turned out to be a difficult task. There are some databases such as TPCDB that collect worldwide electricity usage data. But retrieving the data from these databases was more challenging than expected.
What did we learn?
In order to reduce the consumption of energy it is necessary that consumers understand how much each of their devices contributes to their total energy consumption. The provision of a transparent comparison system and a user friendly open database is a first step towards this goal. Thus we feel that our simple web application could be very useful for many energy consumers. Be aware that the results are preliminary and that there are still some bugs.
And in case you are curious about our energy consumption during the hackathon, have a look here :)
