A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement audits the EV pool-van charging bay's sunshine-window compliance log against its own smart meter, finding most sessions logged compliant draw the bulk of their charge after the window closes.
A 14-week smart-meter audit finds most of a compliant session's charge lands on full-price power once the window closes
Every pool van plugged in before the University’s three-hour sunshine window closes earns the same tick in Facilities’ charging log, regardless of how much of its battery fills before the discount expires. A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement puts that tick against the charging bay’s own smart meter, and finds the two rarely describe the same session.
Across a 14-week deployment spanning nine pool vans and two charging bays, the compliance log recorded 94% of sessions as sunshine-window compliant. The meter tells a narrower story: a median of 38% of each session’s energy actually lands inside the window, a share that fell steadily as the term wore on.
You can tune a controller to hit its setpoint, or you can tune it to look like it’s hitting the setpoint. Only one of those survives an audit.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab
The finding extends the Lab’s long-running interest in measurement systems that improve the things they measure, and in what survives once a log outlives the behaviour it was built to reward. Co-author Dr Mirela Hanke placed the pattern alongside the School’s broader interest in what a compliance flag is actually built to notice, and what it quietly stops asking once adopted.
The full research poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ut1c7a.