Exploring The Value of Energy Disaggregation Through Actionable Feedback

Over the past few years, dozens of new techniques have been proposed for more accurate energy disaggregation, but the jury is still out on whether these techniques can actually save energy and, if so, whether higher accuracy translates into higher energy savings. In this paper, we explore both of these questions. First, we develop new techniques that use disaggregated power data to provide actionable feedback to residential users. We evaluate these techniques using power traces from 240 homes and find that they can detect homes that need feedback with as much as 84% accuracy. Second, we evaluate whether existing energy disaggregation techniques provide power traces with sufficient fidelity to support the feedback techniques that we created and whether more accurate disaggregation results translate into more energy savings for the users. Results show that feedback accuracy is very low even while disaggregation accuracy is high. These results indicate a need to revisit the metrics by which disaggregation is evaluated.