PETRAS Imperial smart-plug project featured in Washington Post

A recent Internet of Things (IoT) study from researchers at Imperial College Business School featured in Washington Post showed that when people decide to reduce energy consumption at home they don’t merely do so to save money. If anything, it suggests that some forms of materialistic or competitive thinking may inhibit deep or long-lasting conservation attitudes.

The study, recently published in Energy Policy, was able to show this by studying a pretty perfect test population: postgraduate students in West London, who did not have to pay anything for their energy use in their student residence halls — and, indeed, many of whom were young enough that they had no experience with energy bills at all. Therefore, any change to their at-home energy use behavior could hardly be attributed to a desire to save money.

The researchers found that simply informing the students about how much energy they were using, and how it compared with what other students were doing, led to a 22 percent decrease in overall usage. And at least part of this effect seems tied to the students’ environmental values.

The team of researchers led by Dr Pantelis Koutroumpis decided to take this work a step further introducing these experiments in the real world. The project is expected to begin in September with a large pool of households in Greater London.