YouPower: An open source platform for community-oriented smart grid user engagement

Abstract

This paper presents YouPower, an open source platform designed to make people more aware of their energy consumption and encourage sustainable consumption with local communities. The platform is designed iteratively in collaboration with users in the Swedish and Italian test sites of the project to improve the design and increase active user participation. The community-oriented design is composed of parts that link energy data to energy actions, provide comparisons at different levels, generate dynamic time-of-use signals, offer energy conservation suggestions, and support social sharing. The goal is to bridge people's attitude-behavior gap in energy consumption and to facilitate the behavior change process towards sustainable energy consumption that is implementable in people's daily life. Preliminary results show that community-oriented energy intervention has the potential to improve user engagement significantly.

Bridging the Attitude-Behaviour Gap in Household Energy Consumption

“…In this paper, the facilitation of the behavior change process that is implementable in the context of one's everyday life is proposed to bridge the attitudebehavior gap in household energy consumption. The paper extensively discusses literature and draws on our own previous experience [8,9] in the design of household energy interventions.Behavior change does not occur as a single event, but rather as a gradual process that people go through to make durable change [10]. The context of everyday life is important in the sense that it is a key determinant of household energy consumption where the attitude-behavior gap appears.…”

Embedding Internet-of-Things in Large-Scale Socio-technical Systems: A Community-Oriented Design in Future Smart Grids

“…The main outcomes of the CIVIS collaborative design process include (1) an open source social smart grid application called YouPower [25], and (2) community engagement approaches that were implemented during the change process of the project [10,24], both contextualized to the local situations.…”

“…Combining smart sensing and web technologies among others, YouPower is designed as a social smart grid application (developed by the CIVIS project as a hybrid mobile app) that can connect users to friends, families and local communities to learn and take energy actions that are relevant to them together [25,29]. The app encourages an energy-friendly lifestyle and can be linked to users' energy consumption and production data for quasi real-time and historical prosumption information.…”