Using data from connected thermostats to track large power outages in the United States

The detection of power outages is an essential activity for electric utilities. A large, national dataset of Internet-connected thermostats was used to explore and illustrate the ability of Internet-connected devices to geospatially track outages caused by hurricanes and other major weather events. The method was applied to nine major outage events, including hurricanes and windstorms. In one event, Hurricane Irma, a network of about 1000 thermostats provided quantitatively similar results to detailed utility data with respect to the number of homes without power and identification of the most severely affected regions. The method generated regionally uniform outage data that would give emergency authorities additional visibility into the scope and magnitude of outages. The network of thermostat-sensors also made it possible to calculate a higher resolution version of outage duration (or SAIDI) at a level of customer-level visibility that was not previously available

Of impacts, agents, and functions: An interdisciplinary meta-review of smart home energy management systems research

Smart home energy management technologies (SHEMS) have long been viewed as a promising opportunity to manage the way households use energy. Research on this topic has emerged across a variety of disciplines, focusing on different pieces of the SHEMS puzzle without offering a holistic vision of how these technologies and their users will influence home energy use moving forward. This paper presents the results of a systematic, interdisciplinary meta-review of SHEMS literature, assessing the extent to which it discusses the role of various SHEMS components in driving energy benefits. Results reveal a bias towards technical perspectives and controls approaches that seek to drive energy impacts such as load management and energy savings through SHEMS without user or third-party participation. Not only are techno-centric approaches more common, there is also a lack of integration of these approaches with user-centric, information-based solutions for driving energy impacts. These results suggest future work should investigate more holistic solutions for optimal impacts on household energy use. We hope these results will provoke a broader discussion about how to advance research on SHEMS to capitalize on their potential contributions to demand-side management initiatives moving forward

Declining partisan representation at the sub-national level: assessing and explaining the strengthening of local lists in Italian municipalities (1995–2014)

In Western democracies political representation at the national level is still dominated by (old and new) political parties. This article shows that, instead, the representative role of parties may have declined at the local level. In Italy, for instance, the average share of municipal seats held by non-partisan councillors has almost tripled in the last 20 years. By using an original data set, this article classifies different types of Italian local lists, assesses their relationship with traditional parties and explains territorial variation in their success. The results suggest that local lists have become substantially stronger in small municipalities, in regions characterised by weak or declining political subcultures and where regionalist parties are absent or irrelevant. Finally, contrary to the expectation that declining partisanship is linked to modernisation processes and direct civic engagement, local lists have achieved their best results in the less developed areas of the country

Local representative democracy and protest politics:the case of the Five-star Movement

In recent years, protest politics has become a relevant phenomenon in various European countries. Italy has witnessed the rise of the Five-star Movement (M5S), an anti-establishment party, which, at the 2013 general election, obtained one-fourth of the total votes. However, the story of this ‘party-movement’ started at the local level, as a civic network aimed at changing administrative practices in municipal government. By using an original dataset on representation in 671 Italian municipalities from 2010 to 2014, this article aims to explain not only the subnational political success of the M5S but also the challenges and contradictions that a newly formed movement faces in multi-level electoral arenas

Italian politics in an era of recession : the end of bipolarism?

Italian politics have undergone momentous change in the 2007–2017 decade under the impact of the eurozone crisis, whose peak in 2011–2013 could be equated to the earlier watershed years of 1992–1994. The lasting impact of the upheaval in Italian politics in the early 1990s could still be felt in the decade of economic recession, but there were also new challenges prompted by a crisis that had its roots in international financial contagion and which unravelled under the shadow of both recession and austerity. The changes were of an economic, social, cultural, institutional, policy-oriented and political nature. If one central quintessentially political theme stands out by the end of this decade it is the apparent exhaustion of the quest for bipolarisation that was initiated in the early 1990s

Decision-Making Potential and ‘Detailed’ Legislation of Western European Parliamentary Governments (1990-2013)

The first and foremost task of all governments is to make decisions. Consequently, studies on governments should deal above all with their ability to produce legislation. To this respect, this article analyses the legislative productivity of 112 parliamentary governments in 12 Western European democracies (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom) from 1990 to 2013. My independent variable is an index offering an immediate picture of the decision-making potential of parliamentary governments, while the dependent variable is the ‘detailed’ legislative production of those governments. If we are able to differentiate between governments who decide, and governments who do not, we could answer a considerable number of interesting questions: which Western European parliamentary democracies tend to produce more (detailed) laws and which – on the contrary – are used to facing greater difficulties for achieving that goal? What are the reasons behind these opposing trends? The empirical results largely confirms that the more a parliamentary government has got decision-making potential (in terms of the proposed index), the more likely it will pass ‘detailed’ legislation

Decision-Making Potential and 'Detailed' Legislation of Western European Parliamentary Government

This paper aims to address two very interesting topics in political science: firstly, the possibility of measuring governments\u2019 decision-making potential; and secondly, the actual legislative productivity of such governments. As regards the first of these aims, I have created a multidimensional index combining what I assume to be the most important sources of governmental decision-making potential, namely: the political complexion of the governing party or coalition, compared to that of the previous government (alternation in office); the government\u2019s agenda-setting power; the internal cohesion of government (the spatial arrangement of the major party \u2013 or parties \u2013 in office). Each of these dimensions bears differently upon the formulation of my index. As for the second of my aims, I have tested the relationship between such an index and the (detailed) legislative production of eight Western European parliamentary democracies during the period 1987-2012, under the assumption that the higher a government scores on my index, the greater its capacity to produce (detailed) laws. Empirical findings seem to confirm the availability of the index: firstly, GDPI (Government Decision-Making Potential Index) correctly distinguishes between different political (and governmental) systems (the higher the average GDPI of a country, the higher the mean standardized page length of its bills, and as a consequence, the more that country is capable of passing detailed legislation). Secondly, GDPI also seems to be an accurate tool with which to account for the variation in governments\u2019 legislative productivity: the coefficient follows the predicted direction, is significantly correlated to the dependent variable and accounts for a fairly substantial amount of the variance in the dependent variable