Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 1 - InBetween (ICT enabled BEhavioral change ToWards Energy EfficieNt lifestyles)
Teaser
Inducing a behavioral change towards Energy Efficiency represents an unsolved societal challenge with potentially enormous environmental impact, but it is still difficult to get people to adopt a more energy-efficient lifestyle due to several factors:-low monetary benefits for...
Summary
Inducing a behavioral change towards Energy Efficiency represents an unsolved societal challenge with potentially enormous environmental impact, but it is still difficult to get people to adopt a more energy-efficient lifestyle due to several factors:
-low monetary benefits for the individuals (an average energy bill does not represent a significant portion of the home budget)
-low capability to change energy demand patterns and energy use practices due to aspects related to lifestyle, habits, daily routines, work/family commitments
-lack of global conscience related to the impact of energy generation and use on the environment (pollution, Greenhouse Gas emissions) , and the tendency to perceive the individual consumption as insignificant
-the complexity of existing ICT platforms/tools which usually require intensive User engagement often interfering with the normal, everyday, activities.
In particular, concerning behavioral change there is a difference between agency and capacity:
-Agency: user’s interest in and willingness to act (behave in a certain way)
-Capacity: actor’s ability to perform the choices he/she made
Both agency and capacity are contextual and influenced by technical, institutional, financial, political, social, psychological and other factors.
InBetween Project Consortium (made up by RINA as the project coordinator, ACCIONA, AIT, DEVELCO PRODUCTS, IDC, PUPIN, VILOGIA and SONNENPLATZ) is going develop a cloud based platform that does not require complex or expensive equipment installation and that aims to provide easily accessible tailored information which is perceived by people as relevant to them and with clear energy (and non-energy) added value.
InBetween platform will allow Users to integrate their building’s connected devices and systems with advanced energy analytics and optimisation services to create a comprehensive and customized recommendation and feed-back solution.
Work performed
The activities of Inbetween project for the first 18 Months have been performed in accordance to the contractual terms and they have seen the collaboration of the different partners in order to achieve the challenging results as expected. The main achievements of the period can be summarized as follow:
• design and execution of survey that provided the social-behavioural-technical view of each household and users in the residential and non-residential buildings (WP1,WP3)
• identification of barriers for technology acceptance in our two project deployment sites, Vilogia and Sonnenplatz (WP1,WP3)
• definition of profiles of the users which consider perceived and actual barriers and opportunities for engagement (WP3)
• definition of a set of tailored interventions and engagement programs and options in relation with consumers’ technological profiles (WP3)
• definition of dissemination action in support to user’s engagement (WP6)
• development of Inbetween mobile application, to present information to users, as well as collect actuation commands and preferences (WP2)
• collection of a first set of feedbacks from residential and non residential users (WP5)
• energy profiling of user according to their level of agency and capacity (WP3)
• development of ontology that correlates energy figures with context of user. Ontology is representative for project use cases (WP2)
• design of a middleware for information flow and data exchange among services (WP2)
• design of mechanism for evaluation of energy performance of energy consumers at each demo site, aiming to provide fair comparison (benchmarking) between them and deliver overall performance ranking. The same mechanism enables self-assessment and comparison with prior energy performance for a particular energy consumer (see WP2)
• design of User profiling service is to classify users (apartment occupants, public/office building occupants) into distinct groups based on their consumption habits (see WP2)
• design of a energy hub model that simulates the energy flows at the demo sites and allow for their optimisation against multiple technical, environmental and economic criteria (WP2)
• development of the Non intrusive load monitoring service (WP2)
• specification and design of Cloud based integration platform architecture (WP1,WP2)
• deployment of InBetween Platform components for enabling data gathering from sensors deployed at the two demo sites (WP2,WP4)
• development of Canonical data model (CDM) that is a common data model for unification of diverse field-level measurements (WP2)
• design and development of external interfaces with online weather services (WP2,WP4)
• development of an updated version of Develco Gateway SW to interface third party Heat meter and the new selected thermostat valves (WP4)
• conduction of market analysis focuses on the energy efficiency sector and in particular on the smart home industry (WP6)
• definition of preliminary exploitable results (WP6)
• analysis of patent to understand and identify the patent scenario corresponding to the topic of the inBETWEEN project (WP6)
• definition and execution of a deployment methodology composed by the following phases: deployment site analysis, platform customization, deployment planning and preparation, installation, commissioning, verification, and user training (WP4)
• development of tools to translate the demonstration site and user information, as well as collected installation data in terms of inbetween ontology concepts (WP4)
Final results
inBETWEEN goes beyond currently available ICT technologies used for inducing the End User behaviour change towards more energy efficient lifestyles by simultaneously assisting Users to IDENTIFY energy wastes, LEARN how they can conserve energy and MOTIVATE them to act
-existing state of the art is not effective against barrier for technology acceptance, technology use and barrier for technology effectiveness
-existing infrastructures are complex and ICT solutions do not provide any semantic of the energy consumption figures correlated with the actual user context
By October 2020, the project will assist people to identify energy wastes and learn how they can conserve energy:
-Cause a significant reduction of final energy consumption prompted by innovative ICT solutions clearly quantified and substantiated, and subsequent reduction of CO2 emissions
-Accelerate the wider deployment and adoption of user-friendly ICT solutions prompting behavioural change and energy efficiency, including plans for its sustainability after the project\'s life and potential/readiness for replication
-Get a number of energy end-users changing their behaviour documenting why and how changes are an effect of particular measures taken, as well in terms of the sustainability of the behavioural change
Website & more info
More info: http://www.inbetween-project.eu.