4 Energy Efficiency Experiment

The Energy Efficiency experiment was set up in four countries (Finland, Sweden, Netherlands and Portugal), involving four Living Lab environments. The thematic objective of the energy experiment was to stimulate behavioural changes among people, by providing real-time updates on energy consumption through smart meters as well as testing new smart metering solutions and creating new business models for SMEs based on the finding of these actions.

All the four countries had a different basis for energy consumption because of the different climate conditions and the borders set by these conditions for energy efficiency. Legal entities as well as national energy players set demands to mitigate energy consumption as well as lowering/shifting of consumption peaks. The living lab settings were in most part similar except for the Finland pilot that is located in a higher voltage office building when in the other living labs the pilot is of low-voltage metering point; namely private homes.

The cross border piloting focused on knowledge sharing and common research benchmarks related to user behaviour transformation among WP3 partners. From the four different living labs few key issues have risen above others in terms of user involvement and notification. The most flagrant issues related to energy proved to be the way in which the users are notified of their energy consumption and therefore are incorporated in the process of energy savings, and also to how to keep them engaged long-term. End users are most likely to change their

consumption habits to greener ones if they have a good knowledge on what their usage has been before, what this usage means in terms of minutes and euros, as well as have clear objectives on what the consumption could be and with what means this could be achieved.

Users demonstrate an interest at the start of ICT use and interaction, but interest tends to decrease in time if users are not engaged and challenge on regular intervals. Hence, energy efficiency information workshops are essential to raise user awareness, provided messaging and language are appropriate to the audience involved. With this in mind cross border activities are vital in sense of fresh ideas and common methodologies for interpreting the user behaviour changes.

Real time data is an added value if the presentation of the data is adequate to the audience, namely baseline and real time consumption displays. Real time measurement has gathered new players to the field of energy efficiency that lack the motivation or knowhow to create integratable solutions into the emerging industry of smart metering vendors, yet instead all players want to create a full range solution providing full package from measurements into costumer displays. This leads to a large number of players in the market and creates interface challenges as solutions tend to be compatible with only their own software. Conventional metering vendors or established energy management software providers can co-operate quite easily on national level because of old partnerships but new SMEs lack the knowledge or network of partners so they could focus on their core knowledge part of the solution.

The challenge for SME’s is to take the advantage of being in permanent touch with up-to-date technologies, from different companies in the field of energy metering, with partners from different European countries, sharing ideas and forming business alliances. The most obvious benefit is for the Living Lab community and network to be able to actively disseminate Apollon experiences and pilot results, at the local, national and European levels. The greatest challenge is the absence of a single uniform European Energy service market for consumers. There are different industry legacies, regulatory environments, standards and supporting instruments for each individual European country. This emphasizes the prime importance of an instrument like to bring obstacles and challenges in this emergent lead market to the attention of the European Commission.

Within the APOLLON project international cooperation has shown benefits from exchange of experiences and lessons learnt from the partners, allowing the results of an initiative developed elsewhere to be appropriated and worked upon in other projects. This allows a convergence of resources, leveraging European-wide available assets (scientific excellence, technologies, methodologies, tools, experimental facilities, Living Labs, user communities) and avoids double work while achieving the same results.

The concrete results of the co-operation related to user behaviour transformation methods and monitoring can be seen in the good results in energy savings of the four living lab pilots:

Helsinki: Average 9% (increase of energy usage 4,0% to decrease of 24,1%) Luleå: Average 9% (5-12% decrease of energy usage) Amsterdam: Average 6% (4-8% decrease of energy usage) Lisbon: Average 15% (9-20% decrease of energy usage)

In order to establish a common language and terminology and an easy and effective communication with the various partners within the Living Lab experiments a common research framework was applied to the experiments. This framework has assisted the experiments in structuring the activities and putting them into a process oriented frame. The research framework has given all the LLs the possibility to evaluate their activities and to