ENERGY AWARENESS IN THE OFFICE AND RESIDENTIAL BUILT ENVIRONMENTS: THE ECOFFICES AND ECOFAMILIES EXPERIMENTS

ABSTRACT The "Energy-efficient Smart Building" is first a Building where the energy consumption is measured (with sensors) and controlled (with monitoring systems), allowing to optimise energy demand thanks to information streams, but also a Building able to manage understanding of the users regarding their habits and living styles, adapting to their practices, and providing easily available, comprehensible and useful information for further operations through various interfaces and taking advantage of new technologies like gaming and mixed reality. This paper introduces to two projects, one completed, one ongoing: the ECOFFICES -Energy Challenge within Offices -project [1] proposed a challenge for saving energy in office buildings in the form of a game, with an energy competition between employees taking place in an office building, and combined advanced energy metering, energy awareness and benchmarking to create an incentive scheme for energy savings. The ongoing ECOFAMILIES project [2] is investigating the "energy awareness" topic in the residential sector: following a user-centered approach, participatory workshops with families are organised with the ambition to co-design user interfaces for energy tracking and efficiency improvement at home. Issues such as type of information to be displayed, usage scenarios, type of physical device, shape and interaction to be implemented, are discussed together with the project team composed by designers, sociologists, construction, energy and IT experts

"GOOD CAUSES" CROWDFUNDING AS A DRIVER FOR BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE IN DEMAND RESPONSE SCENARIOS

International audienceThe purpose of the CITYOPT Nice pilot project is to reduce domestic consumption during peak load hours, by engaging residents with demand response scenarios through a mobile app. This paper analyses the CITYOPT approach, suggesting that, when economic rewards are missing, a mix of educational activities, community involvement, social proof, and altruistic rewards could be a significant motivation for potential users. This study also explores possible positive consequences of crowdfunding campaigns to motivate participation and long-term engagement. Moreover, 8 other areas of improvement that could lead to higher user engagement were elicited during the research. Results imply that behaviour change considerably contributed to reducing the average energy consumption during the peak loads, and suggest that there is space for replication of the CITYOPT French pilot in other countries

Reducing Energy Consumption and Carbon Footprint by Smart and Sustainable Use

The workshop “Reducing energy consumption and carbon footprint by smart and sustainable use” was organized on 29 June 2017 in the context of the International conference Sustainable Places 2017 with the aim to discuss the latest progress and innovations resulting from 7 projects developing solutions to reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint by smart and sustainable use

Rapport final du projet ECOFFICES

Pacalabs Ecoffices, www.ecoffices.comL'idée du projet ECOFFICES est de réaliser une compétition énergétique au sein d'un bâtiment tertiaire à l'aide d'une instrumentation permettant d'obtenir des informations sur ses consommations énergétiques réelles, et de connaître les usages que font les employés des équipements. Le recours aux Technologie de l'information et de la Communication (TIC) permet non seulement de tracer les consommations réelles du bâtiment mais aussi, via une interface utilisateur adaptée, de sensibiliser les employés au thème des économies d'énergie. La mise en compétition des équipes peut de plus inciter les employés à améliorer leurs usages des équipements, à augmenter leurs comportements "éco-responsable" et ainsi à diminuer les consommations énergétiques

Renewable Heating and Cooling Solutions for Buildings and Industry

This workshop brought together a selection of H2020 EU-funded projects involving experts from the biomass, geothermal, solar thermal, and heat pump sectors to discuss a common strategy for increasing the use of renewable energy technologies for heating and cooling for buildings and industry

Improving energy awareness and use in office buildings: the ICT-enabled ECOFFICES challenge

International audienceIt is now fully acknowledged that one of the priorities to deal with energetic and environmental challenges and to reach an important decrease on energy consumption is to improve energy management in the building (residential and service) sector. To reduce energy consumption in the built environment, and besides for optimizing the building envelope and improving the overall management of building equipments and systems, the building energy consumption by users and the impact of use and occupancy are critical aspects. This article focuses on approaches to make people aware of the importance of saving energy, and introduces to the "EcOffices" energy challenge, a competition for saving energy in office buildings by change of behavior, based on a comprehensive use of ICT and including an advanced usage analysis on the acquisition of eco-friendly behaviors generated by this type of challenge