All day
Breakfast with SFI
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
8:00 a.m. Breakfast
8:30 a.m. Talk
Latham & Watkins LLP
140 Scott Drive
Menlo Park, CA
Crowdsourcing a More Efficient City
Paul Hines, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, University of Vermont; Sabbatical Visitor, Santa Fe Institute
Energy consumption in cities results in massive impacts on air quality and the climate. Smart grid technology has the potential to minimize these impacts by providing detailed feedback to consumers about their energy consumption, enabling them to make better, more energy efficient decisions. But this approach can only work when consumers trust and know what to do with the information.
Hines will explore a new, bottom-up approach to providing feedback to people about their energy usage. With this method, recently field-tested as a social network called EnergyMinder in Vermont, customers see how much energy they consume and can collaboratively ask and answer questions, helping them understand why their home consumes more or less energy than other homes, for example. The trial suggests that crowdsourced energy efficiency can reveal insights that would not be gained through a top-down, expert-driven modeling process. Combined with adoption of cleaner energy sources, this approach can make cities more efficient, one household at a time.
Paul Hines is an associate professor in the school of engineering at the University of Vermont and a member of the adjunct research faculty at the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center. He serves as the vice-chair of the IEEE PES Working Group on Cascading Failure, and as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid. Paul is a National Science Foundation CAREER award winner and his research on blackouts has been featured in Science magazine and Scientific American.
Seating is limited and by invitation only.
Please click here to register and reserve your place online or call the Office of Advancement at 505.946.3678 by March 20.