Energy Monitoring through Social Networks

Abstract

Social networks play a significant role nowadays in changing people's behaviours. However, this is a fact of which only few of the energy monitoring system manufacturers have taken advantage. This thesis explores the use of social networking in monitoring and modifying household energy use.

The results of this study indicate that providing real-time feedback reduces the energy usage of the consumers and further reductions in energy consumption can be gained by involving the consumers in a competition to keep overall consumption down. Also, they indicated that there might be a correlation between strong affinity and social relations among members of a community and the speed of change in people's conservation behaviour.

This research contributes to a greater understanding of people's conservation behaviour. It is a part of a larger project (iDSLM project) aimed at providing techniques to better manage domestic electricity consumption without overtly affecting quality of life; this project involved developing a monitoring system on the Facebook platform to evaluate the influence of both real-time feedback and competition on changing consumers’ conservation behaviour (University of Waikato, 2011-2012).