Beyond energy services: A multidimensional and cross-disciplinary agenda for home energy management research

Oliveira, Sonja; Badarnah, Lidia; Barakat, Merate; Chatzimichali, Anna; Atkins, Ed

Abstract

Home Energy Management (HEM) has a significantly growing impact on strategic energy policy, digital equity, as well as housing development and transport issues. With the proliferation of home working, reliance on electricity for heating and cooling and the increasing needs for electric charging for transportation, there is an urgent need to develop novel ways for efficient management of home energy use. Current efforts focus on HEM technologies at individual household levels, without considering the social or spatial context or their collective community-wide interrelated dependencies. We propose a multifaceted agenda at the intersection of disciplinary domains to tackle this problem by using a multidimensional lens that draws on energy behaviour, architectural research, biomimetics, and computational design, simultaneously. Optimal and effective behavioural patterns can be extracted and abstracted from nature, informing a more collective and interrelated behavioural dependencies approach that considers the complex multidimensional energy use patterns of different housing typologies. This paper discusses the analytical benefits of this new research approach through a study of home energy management behaviour. The approach though could be expanded to consider other similar empirical contexts whereby sustainable multidimensional resource management is sought such as water use, food distribution as well as transport and mobility.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 14, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Nov 7, 2021
• Publication Date: Mar 1, 2022
• Deposit Date: Nov 14, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 8, 2023
• Journal: Energy Research and Social Science
• Print ISSN: 2214-6296
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 85
• Pages: 102347
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2021.102347
• Keywords: Social Sciences (miscellaneous); Energy Engineering and Power Technology; Fuel Technology; Nuclear Energy and Engineering; Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, architecture, biomimetics, computational design, cross-disciplinary methods, home energy management
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9948928
• Publisher URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629621004382?via%3Dihub
• Additional Information: This article is maintained by: Elsevier; Article Title: Beyond energy services: A multidimensional and cross-disciplinary agenda for home energy management research; Journal Title: Energy Research & Social Science; CrossRef DOI link to publisher maintained version: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2021.102347; Content Type: simple-article; Copyright: © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.