Department of Computer Science and Technology

Technical reports

A model personal energy meter

Simon Hay

September 2011, 207 pages

This technical report is based on a dissertation submitted August 2011 by the author for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the University of Cambridge, Girton College.

DOI: 10.48456/tr-805

Abstract

Every day each of us consumes a significant amount of energy, both directly through transport, heating and use of appliances, and indirectly from our needs for the production of food, manufacture of goods and provision of services.

This dissertation investigates a personal energy meter which can record and apportion an individual’s energy usage in order to supply baseline information and incentives for reducing our environmental impact.

If the energy costs of large shared resources are split evenly without regard for individual consumption each person minimises his own losses by taking advantage of others. Context awareness offers the potential to change this balance and apportion energy costs to those who cause them to be incurred. This dissertation explores how sensor systems installed in many buildings today can be used to apportion energy consumption between users, including an evaluation of a range of strategies in a case study and elaboration of the overriding principles that are generally applicable. It also shows how second-order estimators combined with location data can provide a proxy for fine-grained sensing.

A key ingredient for apportionment mechanisms is data on energy usage. This may come from metering devices or buildings directly, or from profiling devices and using secondary indicators to infer their power state. A mechanism for profiling devices to determine the energy costs of specific activities, particularly applicable to shared programmable devices is presented which can make this process simpler and more accurate. By combining crowd-sourced building-inventory information and a simple building energy model it is possible to estimate an individual’s energy use disaggregated by device class with very little direct sensing.

Contextual information provides crucial cues for apportioning the use and energy costs of resources, and one of the most valuable sources from which to infer context is location. A key ingredient for a personal energy meter is a low cost, low infrastructure location system that can be deployed on a truly global scale. This dissertation presents a description and evaluation of the new concept of inquiry-free Bluetooth tracking that has the potential to offer indoor location information with significantly less infrastructure and calibration than other systems.

Finally, a suitable architecture for a personal energy meter on a global scale is demonstrated using a mobile phone application to aggregate energy feeds based on the case studies and technologies developed.

Full text

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BibTeX record

@TechReport{UCAM-CL-TR-805,
  author =	 {Hay, Simon},
  title = 	 {{A model personal energy meter}},
  year = 	 2011,
  month = 	 sep,
  url = 	 {https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-805.pdf},
  institution =  {University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory},
  doi = 	 {10.48456/tr-805},
  number = 	 {UCAM-CL-TR-805}
}