The cost of virtue : reward as well as feedback are required to reduce user ICT power consumption
Abstract
We show that students in a school lab environment will change their behaviour to be more energy efficient, when appropriate incentives are in place, and when measurement-based, real-time feedback about their energy usage is provided. Rewards incentivise `non-green' users to be `green' as well as encouraging those users who already claim to be `green'. Measurement-based feedback improves user energy awareness and helps users to explore and adjust their use of computers to become `greener', but is not sufficient by itself. In our measurements, weekly mean group energy use as a whole reduced by up to 16%; and weekly individual user energy consumption reduced by up to 56% during active use. The findings are drawn from our longitudinal study that involved 83 Computer Science students; lasted 48 weeks across 2 academic years; monitored a total of 26778 hours of active computer use; collected approximately 2TB of raw data.
Citation
Yu , Y & Bhatti , S N 2014 , The cost of virtue : reward as well as feedback are required to reduce user ICT power consumption . in Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Future Energy Systems . e-Energy '14 , ACM , New York, NY, USA , pp. 157-169 . https://doi.org/10.1145/2602044.2602063
Publication
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Future Energy Systems
Type
Conference item
Rights
©2014. The Authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.
Description
This work was partly supported by the IU-AC project, funded by grant EP/J016756/1 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.