II Designing IT Solutions for Individual Households
In recent years, research on the role of information systems (IS) in creating sustainable power systems has become a cornerstone of the IS discipline. In this paper we consider a particular aspect of this role—information systems as the facilitator of syn
- PDF / 571,877 Bytes
- 40 Pages / 419.528 x 595.276 pts Page_size
- 89 Downloads / 215 Views
stract In recent years, research on the role of information systems (IS) in creating sustainable power systems has become a cornerstone of the IS discipline. In this paper we consider a particular aspect of this role—information systems as the facilitator of synergies between green technologies in the Smart Grid. Following a design perspective we propose that information systems can enhance technical objects with new features, thereby increasing their potential value towards a sustainable energy paradigm. We substantiate this proposition using a case study on batteries of electric vehicles. The information system designed in this study enables the battery to serve as an energy storage device in conjunction with a residential photovoltaic system while the vehicle is parked at home. This IS-enabled additional feature provides several financial and environmental benefits to the owner and society at large. Additionally, based on this case study, we outline possible
T. Brandt, IT Solutions for the Smart Grid, DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-12415-1_2, © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2016
34
II Designing IT Solutions for Individual Households
interferences and obstacles in designing information systems for the Smart Grid and provide recommendations to guide future research.
1 Introduction The pursuit of environmentally sustainable practices in society and economy has become one of the central objectives for many governments, companies, and citizens around the globe. Its incarnation takes various shapes—from organic farming in California to the phaseout of nuclear power plants in Germany and solar-powered rural electrification in Bangladesh. Through Green Information Systems and Energy Informatics, it has also developed into a major stream of Information Systems (IS) research. The scale and scope of publications range from theoretical groundwork (Elliot, 2011; Melville, 2010; Watson et al., 2010) through transitions towards sustainable information systems (Hilpert et al., 2013; Seidel et al., 2014) to design and behavior (Corbett, 2013; Loock et al., 2013). However, since “green” technologies are still facing tremendous obstacles with respect to costs and system integration, further research is clearly needed in order to overcome these barriers. In this paper we investigate the impact of information systems at the intersection with physical power systems from a theoretical as well as an applied design perspective. This intersection is commonly referred to as the Smart Grid (Farhangi, 2010) and issues surrounding smart grids have been a cornerstone of recent Energy Informatics research (Goebel et al., 2014). We start out by developing the guiding hypothesis of our research—information systems give access to new features of technical objects within the power system. For this purpose, we introduce a theoretical model that relates design features of the information system to features of the power system. We coin them Enhancing Features since they enhance a technical object by providing a new use that was previously inaccessible. We pr
Data Loading...
