On the edge of supply: designing renewable energy supply into everyday life

DOI

10.2991/ict4s-14.2014.6How to use a DOI?

Keywords

renewables, community, supply responsive design

Abstract

With peak oil behind us, nuclear generation capacity dwindling, and increasingly daunting looking carbon emissions targets, we are moving to a world where we must consider transitioning to renewable energy sources. Renewables are time varying and their inherent unpredictability must challenge our everyday assumptions around energy availability—leading, we believe, to an emphasis on ‘supply’ rather than ‘demand’. Using a range of methods including action research, participatory design and technology mediated enquiry, we report on our work in partnership with the community of Tiree as an exemplar of this future. Tiree is the outermost of the Scottish Inner Hebrides— a remote island on the edge of the national electricity grid with a precarious grip on energy—here we uncover the role of renewables and the resilience of a community in moving away from traditional energy provision. We offer opportunities for designing ICT to support supply driven practices in this context, and a simple framework for exploiting under and over supply.

Copyright

© 2014, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Maria Angela Ferrario
AU  - Stephen Forshaw
AU  - Peter Newman
AU  - William Simm
AU  - Adrian Friday
AU  - Alan Dix
PY  - 2014/08
DA  - 2014/08
TI  - On the edge of supply: designing renewable energy supply into everyday life
BT  - Proceedings of the 2014 conference ICT for Sustainability
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 48
EP  - 57
SN  - 2352-538X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/ict4s-14.2014.6
DO  - 10.2991/ict4s-14.2014.6
ID  - Ferrario2014/08
ER  -