Supporting Solar Energy Coordination among Communities

Abstract

The transition to renewable energy is likely to require the creation of growing numbers of energy communities: collectives organized around shared, local renewable resources. Unlike individual households however, the requirements for such communities to share a resource and demand-shift their consumption are still unexplored. By deploying a custom sensor energy monitoring kit and data physicalization workshops with 17 households, we examine the factors that impact their coordination around the shared resource. We found that collective demand-shifting has an extended set of considerations including trade-offs related to privacy, flexibility and social cohesion which are core for navigating already delicate neighborly relations. We use these factors to propose design considerations for a digital system that can act as a mediator among households. Such a system should enable multiple levels of immediacy to account for people's routines, should have adjustable levels of privacy to balance policing and fairness and should be able to offload some of the mundane decision-making. This study moves beyond individual energy consumption behavior to help identify energy as a collective issue that demands collective action. Accordingly, our findings contribute to the development of a next generation of Ubicomp technologies that can support collective action for environmental sustainability.