A feedback delivery system for communal energy consumption practices

In recent years, a pervasive shift of thinking has emerged in distributing the existing electrical grid in urban areas from centralized power generations to decentralized local power infrastructures, as a promising contribution to the energy resiliency of cities. Communities and neighborhoods adopting distributed energy resources as a means towards decentralization are designated to communal energy co-generation practices. Along with the co-generation of energy in such communities, it is as important to view energy consumption more than a personal decision but as a response to shared experiences and resources. Re-visioning energy consumption requires re-defining users as an indispensable element of a community through their participation in groups. This paper explores the benefit of computational means of energy feedback delivery, structured upon a collaborative incentive program, as an effective intellectual means of performing a participatory energy sharing dynamics within users of a community. We use the word “participatory” rather deliberately to place emphasize on humans as the end users of community-scale local power infrastructures, and on the institutional forces that reimagine the role of human action on constructing energy resiliency in such communities.