Changing user behavior with home electricity use to reduce and shift the demand on the electric grid

Most household consumers in the US are unaware of their electrical usage or the price of electricity until they receive their monthly bill. However, they are concerned about being "wasteful" when it comes to electricity use. But most consumers have no idea what being wasteful means. What if there was a way to show residential consumers their real-time electrical usage in terms of price or in terms of environmental emissions from non-renewable power plants? Would this appeal to their concerns about wastefulness and cause them to change their behavior with household appliance use? To test this question an experiment was designed, and multiple prototypes were built. The experiment consisted of a prototype showing a traffic light color pattern of two lights. The first light indicated the price/emissions metric chosen based on user allegiance. The second light indicated the usage of electricity in their home.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering and Management Program

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Amarasinghe, Saluka.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Tony Hu.

• Engineering and Management Program.
• System Design and Management Program.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122315

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122315