Meet NUDGE’s coordinator in Siracusa, Italy for the International Conference on Environmental Psychology

Wednesday, 06/Oct/2021: 4:45pm – 6:00pm

Combined use of energy management IoT equipment with digital user interfaces and nudging interventions for behavioural change

Stratos Keranidis1, Filippos Anagnostopoulos2, Stephanie van Hove3, Peter Conradie3, Merkouris Karaliopoulos4
1DOMX, 2IEECP, 3IMEC, 4AUEB

In this symposium, fresh results from ongoing EU projects are presented:

  • The NUDGE project (grant agreement 957012) combines home IoT (internet of things) equipment for energy monitoring and management with a user interface that provides behavioural measures based on social science input to nudge consumers into energy efficient choices.
  • The EVIDENT project (grant agreement 957117) studies in detail how social information may contribute to energy conservation. The WHY project (grant agreement 891943) uses interdisciplinary behaviour science approaches to study the effects of a combined tariff and nudge approach to steer people’s energy use behaviour in favor of a stable and healthy grid.
  • The ENCHANT project (grant agreement 957115) systematically tests the effects of well-established social science intervention strategies to reduce energy consumption in a large-scale role-out under real-world conditions.

The 2018 amended Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) updated the policy framework to 2030 and beyond. EU countries will have to achieve new end-use energy savings by establishing energy efficiency obligation schemes (EEOS), or by adopting alternative policy measures.

In addition, the need to inform end users on their actual consumption through remotely readable meters or alternative cost-efficient methods was highlighted.

These regulatory developments invite market actors to put forth initiatives that enable end consumers to monitor and efficiently control their energy use, for example through the combination of home-IoT equipment for energy monitoring and management (e.g., smart thermostats) with digital user interfaces for user feedback.

The ultimate step is to couple the deployed infrastructure with behavioural measures to promote consumer behaviour change and achieve long-term energy efficiency.

The proposed combined approach is being tested through the NUDGE project in a variety of environments, spanning distributed PV prosumers, optimized EV charging and efficient control of natural gas-based heating.

Results from targeted surveys reveal intentions and preferences of energy consumers but also explore their susceptibility to nudges by eliciting contextual features, biases, and psychological effects underlying the consumers’ behaviour; and their disposition towards specific incentives and policies that could be provided by utilities or public bodies as motivation for changing their attitude towards energy.

https://www.conftool.pro/icep2021/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=40