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a city on a phone vector

21 Nov 2019

Mobile phones can help cities be more energy efficient, study suggests

Dr Edward Barbour. Dr Edward Barbour.

Mobile phone data could be used to make urban buildings more energy efficient, a new research paper has found.

Dr Edward Barbour, of the School of Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering, says his latest study shows mobile phones can provide valuable data on the occupancy of buildings and this can be used to better plan for collective energy use.

Energy use in buildings accounts for more than 40% of total primary energy use in Europe and the United States, with most of them located in urban areas that are growing rapidly.

Electricity generation is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions so making urban buildings more energy efficient could help mitigate global climate change.

However, calculating the energy use of buildings is not a straightforward task as it fluctuates throughout the day.

People move around their cities and their movements drive energy consumption for different building types – for example, the energy consumption of cafes and restaurants is likely to surge at lunchtime and other peak hours.

Previously, the best attempts to capture these movements have involved using surveys.

However, people do not always respond to surveys and quite often they cannot remember the exact details of the questions asked.

As a result, surveys are deemed to only reveal general movement patterns at 'low-resolution'.

 A model city with energy mapped

People move around their cities and their movements drive energy consumption for different building types. Image courtesy of Getty Images. 

Dr Barbour has helped develop a model that shows mobile phone data could be used to improve urban scale building occupancy and mobility estimates.

In contrast to surveys, mobile phones can be used to ‘passively’ track users - meaning the phone user does not need to actively report their movements.

The research, which has been published in a paper in Nature Communications, builds on work by Carlos Cerezo Davila and Siddharth Gupta, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and was conducted in collaboration with academics from Berkeley Engineering, where Dr Barbour worked before joining Loughborough.

Like traffic apps tell us the current state of road congestion, the research team envision the future for creating sustainable buildings involves a model that can tell users what the energy demands are in different places and then identify bespoke efficiency measures.

They say this tool could potentially connect to smart devices that automatically adjust to the energy demand.

The team’s paper is a ‘proof-of-concept’ and the study involved analysing the call records of nearly two million anonymous mobile phone users in Boston, USA, to explore their idea.

They found the data from mobile phones to be more accurate than current methods for estimating occupancy, with energy consumption differing as much as 15% for residential buildings and 20% for commercial buildings.

Read the full press release here