Location
Bishops Cleve, North of Cheltenham
Background
Rooftop Housing Group is a Housing Association serving the West Midlands and Gloucestershire. The organisation has a full-time sustainability officer and a regional manager who is very supportive of innovative projects that promote energy efficiency.
What is the challenge?
Data from the OpenLV project will be used to enable a project taking place on a housing estate near Cheltenham occupied by low income families. There are 183 properties – 80 to 90 of these are owned by Rooftop Housing Group. The housing association is interested to find out whether the local community can be engaged and encouraged to change patterns of energy use.
What is the proposed solution and how is OpenLV enabling it?
Rooftop Housing Group will test an app that will give residents in the trial area access to their community’s real-time electricity demand and carbon emissions, with the intention of raising awareness and changing behaviour around energy use. Residents will be sent email alerts that will provide data about the demand on the local feeder, for example highlighting times of the day when energy use is low. The trial hopes to find out if this information assists residents to understand their electricity consumption and helps them manage their energy consumption better.
Rooftop Housing is working with the local residents to decide on the most effective visual way to convey this information, so it is engaging and easy to understand.
Findings from this trial will form the foundations of a larger extrapolated approach to tackle fuel poverty across all Rooftop communities, which comprise of 6,000 properties.
