Abstract
Understanding and improving the energy consumption behavior of individuals is considered a powerful approach to improve energy conservation and stimulate energy efficiency. To motivate people to change their energy consumption behavior, we need to have a thorough understanding of which energy-consuming activities they perform and how these are performed. Traditional sources of information about energy consumption, such as smart sensor devices and surveys, can be costly to set up, may lack contextual information, have infrequent updates, or are not publicly accessible. In this paper, we propose to use social media as a complementary source of information for understanding energy-consuming activities. A huge amount of social media posts are generated by hundreds of millions of people every day, they are publicly available, and provide real-time data often tagged to space and time. We design an ontology to get a better understanding of the energy-consuming activities domain and develop a text and image processing pipeline to extract from social media the description of energy-consuming activities. We run a case study on Istanbul and Amsterdam. We highlight the strength and weakness of our approach, showing that social media data has the potential to be a complementary source of information for describing energy-consuming activities.
Highlights
IntroductionTo meet this target, energy policies and programs should be formed and individuals should be motivated to change their energy consumption behavior [1], both in terms of energy conservation and energy efficiency
Europe’s 2030 Energy Strategy targets a 40% cut in greenhouse gas emissions compared to 1990 levels, at least a 27% share of renewable energy consumption and at least 27% energy savings compared with the business-as-usual scenario
Since the behavior regarding creating social media posts might differ between cities with a different culture, for our evaluation we conducted a study on the cities of Amsterdam and Istanbul
Summary
To meet this target, energy policies and programs should be formed and individuals should be motivated to change their energy consumption behavior [1], both in terms of energy conservation and energy efficiency. Energy efficiency involves using less energy to provide the same service; for instance, replacing a single-pane window in the house with an energy-efficient one. Energy conservation involves saving energy by reducing or omitting an activity; for instance, turning a light off or reducing the time one watches television. Multiple studies have examined how energy efficiency and conservation could be motivated among policy makers and citizens. In [2] the author explains how comparative feedback on energy usage with others can generate feelings of competition, social comparison, or social pressure, which appears to be more effective in motivating energy conservation than temporal self-comparisons
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