D7.2 Functional and operational design of energy data commons

Summary:

The transition of neighbourhoods from using fossil fuels to electricity, increases the demand for electricity and requires households and small businesses to invest in solar panels or wind turbines. It also requires residents to change their behaviour: they have to start using more energy at times when energy from clean sources is available.

This behavioural change is challenging, as not all consumers have the knowledge or motivation to alter the moments at which they use energy. The ATELIER project, experiments with possible ways to support that behavioural change. Energy data commons are one of the ways to do that. Energy data commons are data reservoirs set up by a community of people, such as residents in a neighbourhood. Data commons provide residents with insights into the energy generated from solar and wind sources within their neighbourhood, while also monitoring the neighbourhood’s overall energy consumption. As this happens in real-time, the data commons allow residents to see the supply and demand of energy evolve over the day in their neighbourhood, which is information they can use to attune their own energy use to moments when there is a lot of energy from clean sources available. This is expected to serve different valuable purposes: it will help to bring down the total CO2 emissions in the neighbourhood, it will reduce energy costs, but also reduces the burden on the energy grid.