The future of sustainable shared economy - week 44

Our idea:

With a system that produces electricity for several usages and outlets the distribution of energy could be described as uneven. When the production is high, or when a household is on vacation, it may be an overflow of electricity. Instead of wasting the excess electricity, or sell it for a small amount to a big power company, our idea is to create a platform where a household can choose where the overflow should go. We think that every household/company have some kind of address for the electricity, so the receiver of the electricity could easily be chosen. This system could be applied both on a national and a global level. The overflow could be delivered to a friend, a hospital, a company or any other organization in the world.

The excess from a household may not be a lot, but millions of household sharing a small part of their sustainable electricity  will make a greater difference. Several power plants that produce unsustainable energy could be closed, and by time we can make sure that all energy comes from a sustainable energy source.

Process: The process so far has consisted of research, brainstorming and preparation. After our meeting with Daniel and Malin we got some tips about people who work on similar projects on KTH. One of the persons of interest is Elina Eriksson who works with Greenleap. We tried to book a meeting with her this week but unfortunately she was out of town this week. To prepare for the meeting we have read about smart grids, energy sharing, motivation for sharing and the future of energy. On monday we are going to meet with her to further discuss her work and our ideas. We have also contacted Cecilia Katzeff, professor and researcher in the field of energy design, to see if she has time to meet with us. We also aimed to do phone interviews with some energy companies to get a better idea of how the market looks today and how they think it will look in the future, this was more difficult than expected. We have called a couple of companies but haven’t gotten through to the right people yet.

We have also made a detailed plan for the mid-crit next week and booked group meetings for the upcoming weeks. We have also looked at the energy market in Sweden today by looking at energy companies, such as Vattenfall, Egen El and Fortum. By doing this we have got an insight of what the challenges and motivations are with people producing their own energy.

What we will do: After the meeting with Elina on monday and with further reading this weekend we will have created a platform of information to build and concretize our idea upon. Since our idea is based on a energy, a subject that can be difficult to understand, we recognize the importance of visualizing the idea in a easily understandable way. Before the presentation next week we will therefore create mock up designs of our application and also visualize the current and future scenario.

Group 4 working process

Challenges encountered: The project is suppose to be designed for a future within 15-20 years, but the energy industry is changing very slowly due to the existing energy grid and how it is built into our societies. Also, we found out that the research area of wireless power is rapidly evolved and have been discussing if we should move away from the “smart grid area” into investigating the wireless power field further. In addition, there are already people working on our initial idea, which means we need to work harder to find our own niche. Energy issues is sometimes difficult to understand so we need to visualize our idea in an easily understandable way.

Bellow follows some questions that are central for our projects.

1. How do we expand renewable energy access to people who cannot install renewable energy on their own properties?  2. How do we make the sharing beneficial for the users?  3. How do we make it flexible enough so participants can customize the service? Who do they want to share their energy with? What kind of renewable energy do they want to use? etc.   4. The energy market is pretty slow changing. How do we use the existing energy programs to build for the future.