(This post will link all the threads of client work I\u2019ve had since I wrote my book on Smart Homes<\/a>. You could call this \u2018the missing chapter\u2019.)<\/p>\n So the UK government has just announced<\/a> it will start fining landlords who rent out properties that are below an E rating on their Energy Performance Certificate<\/a>. In 2030, it\u2019ll be a C rating. This is the second time<\/a> (that I can find) that this policy has been attempted. In the Netherlands, all offices will have to be rated C by 2023<\/a>. What\u2019s going on?<\/p>\n Well, it turns out the \u2018digital transformation\u2019 revolution is coming after your home life. Why? Climate change.<\/strong><\/p>\n What you do counts and will soon be counted<\/strong>. Here\u2019s why.<\/p>\n The UK housing stock is old and people don\u2019t improve on it often enough. Most people don\u2019t consider energy efficiency when they buy a home (source<\/a> p.6) The average interpretation of energy improvement is to service (43%)or replace a boiler (32%). Only in 18% of cases will someone decide to insulate their loft (source p.11<\/a>). Less than 10% will insulate their walls. If you\u2019re renting or sharing a flat you probably don\u2019t care, because you have no power in a conversation with your landlord about energy efficiency. And you\u2019re not going to be in that flat for long anyway. In London, people will move every 5 years and outside of London it\u2019s around 17. That\u2019s a lot of churn.<\/p>\n If we see ourselves as caretakers of the earth, we may want to start talking about the \u2018life\u2019 of a home as having several generations of caretakers. What\u2019s the solution here? Well back in 2016, Mark Simpkins<\/a> and I drew up an idea of a data brick<\/a> which would collect and anonymise information about a home over the course of multiple tenants and owners. Something that belongs to the space rather than to people. Something that captures information we all might need like: \u2018how many times has this property flooded over the last 20 years?\u2019 \u2018who did the repair work and were they any good?\u2019 \u2018how much did you pay for your bills in winter and how many people were you?\u2019. This information should be embedded securely in a space rather than \u2018out there\u2019 for others to use. But equally, it could be polled for publicly relevant research. I\u2019m going to be digging into this with Mark this year and see what happens.<\/p>\n As of the last quarter of 2019, <\/strong>only 28% of UK homes have a smart meter<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong> So what does that mean? There\u2019s a pretty good amount of research done on \u2018average use\u2019 so I imagine that in the near future, this may be used against people. \u2018It looks like you\u2019re spending too much for your home\u2019s footprint, you\u2019ve been charged a \u00a330 carbon tax for the year\u2019 is not too far away from where we\u2019re going. Who will this affect? The uber rich with a swimming pool in the basement, the electric car owners charging at home and large families who are at home most of the time. So it\u2019s going to get complicated very quickly. The thing about this is that it doesn\u2019t required \u2018live data\u2019 it just requires your EAC (estimated annual consumption) which is reasonably easy to obtain. Who will be in charge of the tax? Not sure. It could be a way for the government of moving the 3\/4 of home owners who have not changed energy tariffs (source<\/a> p.6) in the last year and move everyone to renewable providers.<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s your internet home use. <\/strong>The connected devices, things and services you\u2019re streaming or using on \u2018always-on\u2019 mode. Alexa I\u2019m looking at you sideways girl. Michelle Thorne at Mozilla Foundation wrote a nice blog post about this<\/a> because most internet service providers are in the business of shrugging it off. Carbon offsetting for your movie might feel weird but the cooling (ie. energy requirements) for data centres is off the charts<\/a> and probably explains why we keep building nuclear power plants<\/a>. What could happen? I can see a near-future world where some people sign up to a \u2018green\u2019 energy provision which just doesn\u2019t work all the time because it relies on solar power as a next generation virtue signalling or \u2018voluntary simplicity\u2019. After all, what are you using the internet for if not to spend too much time not connecting to your partner, child or pet. I can see Gwyneth Paltrow advocating being #internetfree or only using a #greenscreen Even if a generation of influencing young people do this, it\u2019ll make a dent on energy use in shared housing and might even revive a highstreet and pub or two. Because otherwise we\u2019re talking technical solutions like some crazy add-ons that let you track the carbon emissions use of all those tabs you keep open and that\u2019s good for some but will depress others. We already struggle to keep people engaged and recycling or buying less, how we police their internet use will have to be done carefully.<\/p>\n So yeh, there\u2019s loads to do and lots of it in the realm of the dystopian or practical. In the meantime I think a lot of creative and tech people are keen to get involved (judging by some tweets lately<\/a>) but with not too much experience of working in these complicated areas before. I\u2019m organising The Low Carbon Design Institute<\/a> as an opportunity to explore these topics over the summer in the UK. Otherwise you could do worse than to follow the events put on by the Energy Systems Catalpult<\/a>, Connected Places Catapult<\/a> and research produced by the Cass Asset Management Research Institute<\/a> and the UCL Energy Institute<\/a>\u00a0. And of course there\u2019s Overlay<\/a> who I\u2019ve been doing research for, Jack Kelly\u2019s work at Open Climate Fix<\/a> and Gavin Stark\u2019s IceBreakerOne<\/a>. It\u2019s a good time to be in London for these topics, regardless of the political and actual weather. Bring an umbrella though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How the internet will eat your\u00a0home (This post will link all the threads of client work I\u2019ve had since I wrote my book on Smart Homes. You could call this \u2018the missing chapter\u2019.) So the UK government has just announced it will start fining landlords who rent out properties that are below an E rating… Continue reading How the internet will eat your\u00a0home<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet-of-things","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-EF","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2521\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}