Facilitating Flexible Electricity Use in the Home with Eco-Feedback and Eco-Forecasting

Over the last decade there has been an increased focus on changing domestic electricity consumption behaviors. While the usual approach has been to facilitate reduced consumption, recent work has started looking at facilitating more flexible electricity use as a means of shifting consumption to more favorable times. This approach means that people may behave more sustainably without necessarily using less electricity. Exploring this emerging approach, this paper presents a study of flexibility in domestic electricity use as facilitated by an eco-feedback system with forecast information about price, availability of green energy, and grid demand. The prototype system was deployed in three households for 22 weeks. Our findings show that flexible electricity use is far from trivial to achieve in domestic households. The details of this is relevant for understanding people's ability and willingness to shift electricity consumption, and for the design of systems that facilitate doing this.