First assignment of group n° 052
Resources used by the team[modifier | modifier le wikicode]
First description of our project[modifier | modifier le wikicode]
First description of our project's idea
Provide a proposition of title for your project
Please answer to the three expected questions:
1. What Problem do you want to solve ?
Nowadays, the trend is to reduce the electricity consumption everywhere, particularly in households. Producers create devices that consume less and less, but there is still an issue: the consumption of plugged devices, which are on standby.
Whatever your age, gender or the size of your household: we have found through our research that millions of us are unintentionally wasting electricity when we leave our appliances on standby. It’s an easy mistake to make, yet it costs us a fortune. Moreover it’s part of the top 10 waste of energy at home.
Most of today’s electric devices are put on standby when we want to switch them off (for instance hi-fi systems, most of TVs, etc.…). In fact, these devices that are plugged and left on standby are still consuming electricity. It’s represent approximately 10% of a home energy bill each month, according to a study on standby power by "IBM, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory".
Solutions already exist, but they consist in unplugging devices. There are already “intelligent” sockets, but they just allow us to switch off the electricity flow, and they are expensive. The challenge here is to find a way to reduce/annihilate the electricity consumption of plugged devices on standby, with a cheaper product. Moreover, we think that it is possible to find a way to automatically manage the consumption of plugged devices on standby.
We believe that it is a main issue in today society because it embeds economical, social and environmental matters. We should find a durable solution in a sustainable development program in order to lead household to protect the environment and save money.
Another fact that we analysed is that household can’t measure their day-to-day energy consumption. Indeed they just received a general energy bill without the daily consumption. One of the main issues is that people don't realize how much they are consuming; consequently they cannot reduce it.
2. Why does this problem exist?
In the last decade we have witnessed a dramatic increase in environmental consciousness worldwide.
However, the general public don’t believe that pollution and other environmental damages are impacting on their everyday life. Nowadays, costs of electricity are very high and it is a major issue for each individuals. Wasting electricity hurts the environment: • We are all wasting electricity when we leave our appliances on standby • Electricity is switched on all day long (TV, radio, light, computers,..) • Most of electricity is composed of fossil fuel such as gas, which after burned, and have an impact on the global warming. People are not aware of how much they are consuming. (They only see their overall energy bill at the end of a year) and it could be interesting to monitor the overconsumption of electricity. For example, 74 % of the British population are worried about energy bills. Moreover only half of the ones who received an unexpectedly high-energy bill check if unused appliances are switched off. With the raise of energy prices by a third since 2010, people wish to save money and with the financial crisis as well as the on-going recession strengthen this need even more. (http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/news/brits-could-save-£500m-year-if-they-take-control-their-heating-while-households-could-save-£75)
3. What breakthrough are you commited to creating? We want to inspire people to create a product that can be useful in every household. We want it to be cheaper, easy to use and more efficient than any existing one. Indeed, we want the product to have requirement specifications:
- 1) To make it easier for everyone to manage and monitor their use of energy, especially electricity
- 2) To avoid useless energy expenses so that people can spend more money on food, clothes, and other essential things
- 3) To help the Earth by reducing the useless energy production
- 4) To create a brand new product with major ecological and technical improvement
We want something that can be used by anyone, including children in order to help them to be eco-friendly in their daily life. We don’t want to press the circuit breaker every time we would like to switch off our devices to make sure we don’t overuse electricity.
You get the idea; we want to STOP wasting electricity while we aren’t using it.
We know that solutions already exist but we hope that you will find a way to outweigh those solutions by killing the « devices standby effect » and not only manage electricity use.
We want to use crowd funding in order to find major breakthroughs in the field of electricity consumption because we believe that the more ideas people think of, the more efficient and useful the product will be.
We hope that people will understand how crucial it is to address the issue of electricity consumption due to plugged devices left on standby. We need help to make the sustainable project a reality.
Potential experts already identified
Please mention the potential experts (name, affiliation, likelihood to convince him/her to join the final panel)
