Conversations with my washing machine: an in-the-wild study of demand-shifting with self-generated energy

Domestic microgeneration is the onsite generation of low- and zero-carbon heat and electricity by private households to meet their own needs. In this paper we explore how an everyday household routine – that of doing laundry – can be augmented by digital technologies to help households with photovoltaic solar energy generation to make better use of self-generated energy. This paper presents an 8-month in-the-wild study that involved 18 UK households in longitudinal energy data collection, prototype deployment and participatory data analysis. Through a series of technology interventions mixing energy feedback, proactive suggestions and direct control the study uncovered opportunities, potential rewards and barriers for families to shift energy consuming household activities and highlights how digital technology can act as mediator between household laundry routines and energy demand-shifting behaviors. Finally, the study provides insights into how a “smart” energy-aware washing machine shapes organization of domestic life and how people “communicate” with their washing machine

A sentiment analysis approach to increase authorship identification

Writing style is considered the manner in which an author expresses his thoughts, influenced by language characteristics, period, school, or nation. Often, this writing style can identify the author. One of the most famous examples comes from 1914 in Portuguese literature. With Fernando Pessoa and his heteronyms Alberto Caeiro, alvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis, who had completely different writing styles, led people to believe that they were different individuals. Currently, the discussion of authorship identification is more relevant because of the considerable amount of widespread fake news in social media, in which it is hard to identify who authored a text and even a simple quote can impact the public image of an author, especially if these texts or quotes are from politicians. This paper presents a process to analyse the emotion contained in social media messages such as Facebook to identify the author's emotional profile and use it to improve the ability to predict the author of the message. Using preprocessing techniques, lexicon-based approaches, and machine learning, we achieved an authorship identification improvement of approximately 5% in the whole dataset and more than 50% in specific authors when considering the emotional profile on the writing style, thus increasing the ability to identify the author of a text by considering only the author's emotional profile, previously detected from prior texts.FCT has supported this work – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2019

Marginalization of end-use technologies in energy innovation for climate protection

Mitigating climate change requires directed innovation efforts to develop and deploy energy technologies. Innovation activities are directed towards the outcome of climate protection by public institutions, policies and resources that in turn shape market behaviour. We analyse diverse indicators of activity throughout the innovation system to assess these efforts. We find efficient end-use technologies contribute large potential emission reductions and provide higher social returns on investment than energy-supply technologies. Yet public institutions, policies and financial resources pervasively privilege energy-supply technologies. Directed innovation efforts are strikingly misaligned with the needs of an emissions-constrained world. Significantly greater effort is needed to develop the full potential of efficient end-use technologies

Wind-pv-thermal power aggregator in electricity market

This paper addresses the aggregation of wind, photovoltaic and thermal units with the aim to improve bidding in an electricity market. Market prices, wind and photovoltaic powers are assumed as data given by a set of scenarios. Thermal unit modeling includes start-up costs, variables costs and bounds due to constraints of technical operation, such as: ramp up/down limits and minimum up/down time limits. The modeling is carried out in order to develop a mathematical programming problem based in a stochastic programming approach formulated as a mixed integer linear programming problem. A case study comparison between disaggregated and aggregated bids for the electricity market of the Iberian Peninsula is presented to reveal the advantage of the aggregation

Comparing nuclear power trajectories in Germany and the UK: from ‘regimes' to ‘democracies’ in sociotechnical transitions and Discontinuities

This paper focuses on arguably the single most striking contrast in contemporary major energy politics in Europe (and even the developed world as a whole): the starkly differing civil nuclear policies of Germany and the UK. Germany is seeking entirely to phase out nuclear power by 2022. Yet the UK advocates a ‘nuclear renaissance’, promoting the most ambitious new nuclear construction programme in Western Europe.Here,this paper poses a simple yet quite fundamental question: what are the particular divergent conditions most strongly implicated in the contrasting developments in these two countries. With nuclear playing such an iconic role in historical discussions over technological continuity and transformation, answering this may assist in wider understandings of sociotechnical incumbency and discontinuity in the burgeoning field of‘sustainability transitions’. To this end, an ‘abductive’ approach is taken: deploying nine potentially relevant criteria for understanding the different directions pursued in Germany and the UK. Together constituted by 30 parameters spanning literatures related to socio-technical regimes in general as well as nuclear technology in particular, the criteria are divided into those that are ‘internal’ and ‘external’ to the ‘focal regime configuration’ of nuclear power and associated ‘challenger technologies’ like renewables. It is ‘internal’ criteria that are emphasised in conventional sociotechnical regime theory, with ‘external’ criteria relatively less well explored. Asking under each criterion whether attempted discontinuation of nuclear power would be more likely in Germany or the UK, a clear picture emerges. ‘Internal’ criteria suggest attempted nuclear discontinuation should be more likely in the UK than in Germany– the reverse of what is occurring. ‘External’ criteria are more aligned with observed dynamics –especially those relating to military nuclear commitments and broader ‘qualities of democracy’. Despite many differences of framing concerning exactly what constitutes ‘democracy’, a rich political science literature on this point is unanimous in characterising Germany more positively than the UK. Although based only on a single case,a potentially important question is nonetheless raised as to whether sociotechnical regime theory might usefully give greater attention to the general importance of various aspects of democracy in constituting conditions for significant technological discontinuities and transformations. If so, the policy implications are significant. A number of important areas are identified for future research, including the roles of diverse understandings and specific aspects of democracy and the particular relevance of military nuclear commitments– whose under-discussion in civil nuclear policy literatures raises its own questions of democratic accountability

Factors Influencing Households’ Intention to Adopt Solar PV : A Systematic Review

Rising energy needs, concerns of energy security, mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, climate change phenomenon and a push to utilize indigenous sources for energy generation purposes has encouraged the use of solar photovoltaics (PV). The technological advancements of the recent past, improvement in technologies’ performance, reduction in the prices, policy and regulatory support, and its applicability at household level has made solar energy as a preferred form of energy generation. However, despite its rapid diffusion, it is widely believed that its current application is insignificant compared to its potential. This leads us to ask why solar PV has not been adopted to the level it should have. The existing literature has highlighted a number of factors affecting solar PV adoption. This paper systematically reviews the literature to identify the factors that have been instrumental to solar PV adoption. By exploring the Scopus database, this research identifies 39 articles matching the study objectives. Findings of this research will help academics, technology companies and policymakers in understanding the factors influencing the process and proposing solutions to address these.©2020 Springer. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Advances in Human Factors, Business Management and Leadership. AHFE 2020. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50791-6_36fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Identifying the Rebound - Evidence from a German Household Panel

Using a panel of household travel diary data collected in Germany between 1997 and 2005, this study assesses the effectiveness of fuel efficiency improvements by econometrically estimating the rebound effect, which measures the extent to which higher efficiency causes additional travel.Following a theoretical discussion outlining three alternative definitions of the rebound effect, the econometric analysis generates corresponding estimates using panel methods to control for the effects of unobservables that could otherwise produce spurious results. Our results, which range between 57% and 67%, indicate a rebound that is substantially larger than obtained in other studies, calling into question the efficacy of policies targeted at reducing energy consumption via technological efficiency

Identifying the Rebound: Theoretical Issues and Empirical Evidence from a German Household Panel

Using a panel of household travel diary data collected in Germany between 1997 and 2005, this study assesses the effectiveness of fuel efficiency improvements by econometrically estimating the rebound effect, describing the extent to which higher efficiency causes additional travel.Following a theoretical discussion outlining three alternative definitions of the rebound effect, the econometric analysis generates corresponding estimates using panel methods to control for the effects of unobservables that could otherwise produce spurious results. Our results, which range between 56% and 66%, indicate a rebound that is substantially larger than obtained in other studies, calling into question the efficacy of recently implemented measures in the European Union targeted at technological innovations in the automotive sector