EnergyScout: A Consumer Oriented Dashboard for Smart Meter Data Analytics

TL;DR

EnergyScout is an interactive dashboard designed to help household energy consumers understand and modify their energy usage through visual analysis, personalized insights, and what-if scenarios, promoting smarter energy habits.

Contribution

This paper introduces EnergyScout, a user-centered, interactive visual analytics tool for smart meter data, developed with real data and consumer feedback to enhance energy awareness.

Findings

Effective visual tools improve user understanding of energy consumption.

User feedback led to a versatile, usable dashboard design.

Testing shows increased engagement and potential energy savings.

Abstract

The increasing popularity of smart meters provides energy consumers in households with unprecedented opportunities for understanding and modifying their energy use. However, while a variety of solutions, both commercial and academic,have been proposed, research on effective visual analysis tools is still needed to achieve widespread adoption of smart meters. In this paper we explore an interface that seeks to balance the tradeoff between complexity and usability. We worked with real household data and in close collaboration with consumer experts of a large local utility company. Based on their continued feedback we designed EnergyScout - a dashboard with a versatile set of highly interactive visual tools with which consumers can understand the energy consumption of their household devices, discover the impact of their usage patterns, compare them with usage patterns of the past, and see via what-if analysis what effects a modification of these patterns may have, also in the context of modulated incentivized pricing, social and personal events, outside temperature, and weather. All of these are events which could explain certain usage patterns and help motivate a modification of behavior. We tested EnergyScout with various groups of people, households, and energy bill responsibilities in order to gauge the merits of this system.