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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PEAKapp (Personal Energy Administration Kiosk application: an ICT-ecosystem for Energy Savings through Behavioural Change, Flexible Tariffs and Fun)

Teaser

Summary

In the current situation most European households are informed about their electricity consumption once per year. Considering that feedback about the implications of an individualâ€™s behaviour is one of the major preconditions for changing his or her behaviour, the almost complete disconnection of consumption behaviour and feedback (i.e. consumption information) might impair households in their adoption of energy conservation behaviour. As a first step to overcome this problem, Directives 2009/72/EC and 2009/73/EC, and Directive 2012/27/EC ask for availability of smart electricity meters on nearly all household sites by 2020 (i.e. most EU countries will roll-out smart meters for more than 80% of their households). Smart meters collect the electricity consumption of households in a high frequency (i.e. four times per hour) and transmit these figures to the responsible hub.

The granular consumption data may then be forwarded to the consumers, which can be exploited to motivate them to save energy by better understanding the impact of their behaviour and related financial benefits. With the ascent of smart phones and mobile internet connections, software apps may provide a qualified platform for triggering energy efficiency through exploiting energy consumption data from smart meters in a motivating and incentivizing way.

The European Commission has repeatedly addressed energy savings through ICT, for example in the Impact Assessment for the Energy Efficiency Plan 2011 (European Commission, 2011) and the Evaluation of the Energy Behavioural Change Programmes (European Commission, 2009). These references discuss three conditions that are required to trigger lasting behavioural change that results in energy savings, which are

1. a high level of information and communication,
2. the provision of economic incentives,
3. and a supporting administrative framework, such as regulated static vs. dynamic energy prices.

Consequently, PEAKapp develops a solution which provides residents of social housing and other residential sectors with all the capabilities required to achieve the goals outlined above by addressing an unprecedented array of different mechanisms to motivate lasting and effective action i.e. citizenâ€™s behavioural change through:
a) Peer acknowledgment for achievements through social networks,
b) the provoking force of serious gaming and most outstanding,
c) monetary rewards for consuming electricity in times of high production from renewables (by implementing flexible electricity tariffs).

PEAKapp validates this ICT-solution 2.0 under real life conditions in more than 2,500 households in Austria, Estonia, Latvia and Sweden and aspires to create quick market uptake through an outstanding â€˜ready-to-signâ€™ strategy involving 3 highly innovative electricity retailing companies and one energy utility association.

Work performed

The key objective during the 1st Reporting Period was to develop the app system and to start the field testing thereof. As foreseen in the project plan, a number of different tasks and activities were executed to achieve this objective. Even though the key functionalities of the app system have been defined during the proposal stage of PEAKapp, there were significant degrees of freedom about their final configuration, underlying algorithms and graphical representation.

To resolve all these challenges and finally derive a system specification with promising features for creating lasting customer interest, PEAKapp started by assessing existing solutions with respect to their performance in the context of customer engagement in WP 1. The literature findings were subsequently enriched by personal discussions with executives of energy companies, specialised consultants and experienced researchers to finally derive the system specification of PEAKapp. The system specification was then transferred into close to market ready software systems in WP 2.
WP 3 is dedicated to carrying out the field tests. The necessary steps are i) to implement the system in the infrastructure of the respective electricity retailer, ii) recruit household customers to participate, iii) to provide test customers the app and support them with initial questions/problems, and then iv) to maintain the field tests by moderating the national Facebook groups, send motivating push messages to customers, transfer their achieved monetary savings into the retailersâ€™ billing system and continuously monitor the technical performance of the system. During the first 18 months of the project i) has been completed. In the same period, recruiting was completed in Austria and about 1,600 households are now part of the Austrian PEAKapp test group.

In addition to the work towards the development of the app system and start of the field tests, PEAKapp has disseminated the project objectives and preliminary results to a broad audience.

Final results

The project has made achievements beyond the state of the art in several domains. One special feature of PEAKapp is the possibility to define specific time slots during which discounts are granted to all customers or a subgroup thereof. Related messages can be free electricity on Christmas Day for all customers, or half priced electricity for a sauna round on a cold winter evening sent to owners of such wellness amenities only, as examples.

As a further unique feature, PEAKapp has developed a game exploiting actual customer behaviour into a joyful learning experience for households. In the game PEAKpoker players bet on their electricity consumption of the day, and in the next morning their guess is compared to the actual consumption. If they have overestimated or underestimated their actual consumption, they are asked to virtually produce or consume electricity to compensate the estimation error. Of course, with PEAKapp customers can also check their electricity consumption in various aggregates over time, such as from intra-day to yearly consumption. Households can compare themselves to similar households, so that keeping up with other households is stimulated.

The field testing in PEAKapp is one of the core activities in this project, having two key objectives: 1. to test the customer acceptance and efficacy of dynamic electricity tariffs, which has not yet been studied in a scientifically sound way. The knowledge gained while achieving this objective is not only valuable for the scientific community, but provides important input for policy makers aiming at an impactful exploitation of the European smart metering infrastructure.
At the same time the results of the field tests also strongly support objective 2., namely to create a competitive advantage for the PEAKapp system by providing empirical evidence of customersâ€™ acceptance and its potential contribution to the business strategy of energy retailers. While a number of ideas have evolved how best to exploit the smart metering infrastructure and the respectively collected data, evidence of the efficacy of corresponding solutions mostly rely on expert opinions or test implementations with small samples. Such lack of broadly evidenced effects, both on customer loyalty and energy behaviour, is a strong obstacle for getting interest from the executive level of energy companies for providing their customers a respective ICT solution.