Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - eTEACHER (end-users Tools to Empower and raise Awareness of Behavioural CHange towards EneRgy efficiency)

Teaser

Buildings are responsible for approximately 40% of energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions in Europe. Building users have the potential to reduce energy consumption about 6-10% and improve indoor environmental conditions and comfort through behavioural changes. However...

Summary

Buildings are responsible for approximately 40% of energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions in Europe. Building users have the potential to reduce energy consumption about 6-10% and improve indoor environmental conditions and comfort through behavioural changes. However, motivating behavioural change requires specific methods and strategies to convince people and be effective over the time. It is demonstrated that solutions to address this issue must be appealing, pedagogic and user-friendly, otherwise, rebound effects could provoke even higher energy consumption levels than before the application of these methods. In addition, people are energy users of multiple buildings that they usually visit, live or work on it and thus, the energy behaviour change should be motivated in different contexts (building users, facilities, energy systems…) and roles or profiles (visitors, facility managers, householders, owner, student, teachers…). These issues make the challenge more complex and require solutions that must be focused on social, technical and commercial aspects. Other issues related and addressed by eTEACHER project are:

-People are not connected or aware about building facilities and energy issues are not visible.
-There are not comprehensive solutions that connect BEMS and building occupants (interoperability).
-Buildings has in general low automation and monitoring level.
-There are not prediction tools and tools focused on comfort and users’ feedback.

Overall, initiatives to reduce buildings energy consumption entails less CO2 emissions, what has a positive effect on the climate change and reduce the European dependence of fossil fuels. In addition, the application of energy behaviour change methods allows increasing the energy visibility and energy literacy to extend the positive effects of trained users to any building in different circumstances. Such changes aim to improve the building occupants’ wellbeing, productivity, health and comfort, what turns into better satisfaction of end-users. But not only end-users (building occupants) are benefited of the energy behavioural change, since the economic sectors related to ICT building solutions, building automation, SW developers, facility management and SME can take advantage of new and advanced solutions in energy efficiency.

The overall goal of eTEACHER is to empower energy end-users to achieve energy savings and improve the buildings comfort and health conditions through enabling behavioural change, considering different roles/profiles (visitors, facility managers, teachers, students, owner, householders…) depending on the building they usually visit, live or work respectively.

Work performed

- Social studies. Development of a ‘Key Concepts Summary’ to introduce the project consortium in the behavioural change concepts. Visits to the pilot buildings to know and characterize the current users’ energy behaviour. Two specific workshops: workshop A (Ask) focused on building users and workshop B (Bridge) to align the behaviour analysis and the eTEACHER developments. Analysis of end-user behaviour of pilot buildings (D1.2). Analysis of ICT-based engagement and solutions for increasing energy efficiency of buildings (D1.3). Definition of the enabling change framework for eTEACHER (D1.4). Design and organisation of feedback forums in pilot buildings to guide the development of ICT solutions (user-oriented design).

- BACS add-ons. Definition of technical requirements for eTEACHER ICT solutions, set in overall requirements and use cases according to energy conservation measures, indoor environmental quality and building performance. First steps for the development of the What-if analysis service, Pulse/Metrix service and UBCI/database (universal interface to link with buildings’ BEMS/BACS).

- eTEACHER app. First steps to select the most suitable gamification techniques and development of the web services relating to the mobile app (energy/comfort advisor, user feedback, gamification, dashboarding). Development of central database, containers and REST API to run project mobile app.

- Design of the monitoring and evaluation methodology that establishes the methodology to carry out the demonstration and impact indicators. Research on available sensors for building pilots. Test of reliability and connectivity of sensors. Design of monitoring systems for building pilots. Deployment of sensors (on-going) and integration with database.

- Three exploitation workshops to define the preliminary exploitation strategies for project results.

- Data management plan validated by ethic experts of the EC.

- Several dissemination events organised or participated by partners.

Final results

- ICT-based behavioural change interventions: This project will ensure that development of behaviour change interventions benefits from stakeholder input by using “Enabling Change” approach (see Robinson 2013), and by drawing on DMU’s knowledge of effective engagement for sustainable development. The proposed framework has been used in academic literature, but it has not been really applied by practitioners. This project therefore presents an opportunity to test and develop theories of project design and behaviour change and build a bridge between practitioner-oriented and academic literature.

- What-if analysis: The main innovation will be to provide users with information on how their possible behavioural changes affect energy consumption (“Energy Predictor”) and to give advices which energy decisions to take (“Energy Advisor”). This is the basis for a significant increase in users’ energy awareness resulting in behavioural changes that lead to reduced energy consumption. For this purpose, eTEACHER will develop a library of expert knowledge, including tables, characteristics and basic structure of grey box models in order to ease the set-up of a WiA for energy prediction and advice for any type of building and housing.

- Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and system performance modules: Building automation data is transformed into performance metric by comparing actual measurements with predetermined target and the tool will be enhanced with IEQ and system performance. The IEQ parameters include air quality, thermal conditions, daylight and acoustics. The system performance includes actual airflow rate per room unit, occupancy, zonal energy consumption and central system. The parameters are compared with predetermined targets and provide an overall score for energy efficiency, indoor environmental quality and functioning performance.

- BACS Universal Communication Interface: Through the universal BACS interface the eTEACHER platform, including BACS add-on services and end-user friendly solutions, can be connected to any existing BACS solution, to single device solutions, heterogeneous system solutions or standard business solutions. The project aims to have a BACS interface with an universal character by guarantee the technological compatibility with most commercial BACS and with all relevant communication standards, that solves the following issues by means of a virtualization concept of BACS components:
1) No universal standardized available that fulfils all requirements.
2) Heterogeneous use of BACS communication protocols in buildings (BACnet, EnOcean, etc.).
3) No interoperability between BACS, Smart grid, smart appliances.
4) No standardized description of data points, each HVAC/BACS planner uses its own data point description.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.eteacher-project.eu/.