Can ICT change people’s attitude towards energy efficiency? The answer is certainly yes. This issue was at the core of the last joint workshop held by four energy projects, during the Sustainable Places conference.
Amidst the challenge of improving energy efficiency, increasing attention is being put on how to engage and empower building users and how ICT can help to achieve the goal. To pursue the goal of energy efficiency in buildings through changes in user behaviour, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are increasingly being used to provide information or ‘feedback’ to overcome what is known as energy invisibility.
The extent to which ICT has been used in domestic and non-domestic buildings in recent years has varied with many studies focusing on the impact of in-home-displays in the domestic sector, whilst more-novel methods, such as gamification, have often been tested in the non-domestic sector. The use of ICT offers a wealth of opportunity to both manage energy efficiency in buildings, and to intervene and/or engage with building users to promote more energy efficient behaviours. The topic is analysed in depth in the last eTEACHER paper.
The last Sustainable Places conference (held online from 27 to 30 October) dedicated a specific conference to the behavioural change towards energy efficiency by utilizing ICT tools. Here, four EU-funded projects ( eTEACHER, FEEdBACk, InBetween, and UtilitEE,) presented several methodologies to enhance energy-users engagement, showing the findings achieved and the challenges tackled.
READ IT ONLINE Dear reader, Time flies and after four intensive years of work, eTEACHER is coming to an end! A lot has happened in the past few months, and we have continued working on the demonstration of eTEACHER solutions in our 12 pilot buildings. Close supervision of the monitoring and the ICT tools allowed […]