Europe’s energy transition requires innovation on several fronts. Clean tech has helped, but we also need to find out what leads people to embrace it, say two researchers involved in different EU-funded projects. They share the lessons they have learned so far.
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At the University of Malaga, Spain, a new kind of charging system for electric vehicles (EVs) is being installed. While charging during the day, the cars would sometimes be used as batteries when the grid was low on energy. Users have, however, expressed apprehension about using the system.
“Users perceived this as discharging their battery, which is wrong because the majority of the time the battery will be charging,” said Jaroslaw Kowalski, an assistant professor of interactive technologies at the National Information Processing Institute, Poland. Kowalski is a researcher involved in the EU-funded ebalance-plus project, which seeks to make Europe’s energy grids more flexible.
With global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at an all-time high, moving towards renewable energies is more necessary than ever. These forms of energy are intermittently available, meaning more energy on sunny or windy days, and at off-peak hours. More flexibility in the grid would allow the energy transition to occur faster.
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Recent polling across a number of European countries showed that around 60-81% of people are very or fairly worried about the climate crisis. If climate action led to lifestyle changes, the same poll found that there was less support for it. A willingness to change is therefore important, and technological interventions can help with that.
Breaking Habits
“We have certain habits as consumers of energy, and they were established 100 years ago,” said Kowalski. “We think about electrical energy as an infinite reservoir of energy, we don’t think about how it’s produced.”
Getting people to change is easier said than done, particularly when behaviours are so ingrained. Through ebalance-plus, Kowalski has been investigating how to get people to act more sustainably. His research focuses primarily on the design of software and hardware that will encourage the flexible use of energy.
Alongside behavioural changes such as using our washing machines during off-peak hours (when the grid is under less stress), it is also important to get people to use systems like the one being installed in Malaga.
Kowalski said that one reason why people were so turned off by the idea of having their cars used as batteries was the name of the technology: vehicle to grid charging. This gave users the impression that it would drain their batteries, rather than charge them, demonstrating how psychological and social barriers exist when adopting new technologies. Providing more clear information about the system encouraged people to use it.
Another technology tested during ebalance-plus was an air conditioning system in student dormitories at the University of Calabria, Italy. Students could set the air conditioning to a range of desired temperatures, plus or minus one degree Celsius. When there is more energy available, the room will be a bit cooler, and vice versa.
There are a couple of ideas Kowalski suggests for getting people to use technologies that can help save energy. The first is financial incentives – telling people they will save money by using certain appliances less, for example. A downside is that sometimes people might not see the price saving as worth the effort.
“We should use financial incentives, but it’s not the only tool in our toolbox,” he said.
Another option is to root behaviour changes in new values, such as encouraging people to care about the environment. Though more challenging than it sounds, Kowalski said that through ebalance-plus, he found that small adjustments to user interfaces – such as using green colours, or leaf motifs – led to people interacting with the technology more.
Otherwise, Kowalski suggests using automated systems, like the air conditioning in Calabria, as that removes the need for the user to constantly think about their consumption, and information campaigns which properly explain how the technologies work.
Game the System
Gamification might also be an option for encouraging people to engage more with energy saving technologies.
“I think that sometimes we underestimate the importance of games in our lives,” said Ionah Nuur, a strategic and attitudinal designer at Soulsight, a partner of the EU-funded research project ReDREAM.
As part of ReDREAM, Nuur has collaborated on the development of two apps to be used by households. One focuses on household devices and how people can reduce their energy consumption that way, the other involves renewable energy infrastructure like solar panels.
The former, Nurr said, has a social aspect which uses gamification to get people to use the app.
“You can measure the energy you consume for any device in your house, and after you attempt to reduce it, you can publish the consumption data on the in-app social network,” he explained.
The social network allows communities to encourage each other to meet both individual and collective goals for reducing energy consumption. Though, he adds, some users were not particularly interested in community building, and were more motivated by the opportunity to reduce their personal emissions and save money in the process.
Though some users were engaged with the app and the gamification aspects, other users, despite understanding how to use it, did not fully comprehend the sense of the game.
“Some users were using the gamification interfaces just because they were asked by the demo managers, or they were just curious about the first usage of the application and after that they didn’t use the app anymore,” said Nuur.
He highlighted a couple of lessons learned. He believes that allowing users to receive more personalised notifications from the app’s algorithm would encourage more users to get involved, as well as clearer and customised objectives. Engagement strategies should also focus on the demographic of the individual user, rather than being broadly applicable.
There’s also only so much an app can do. Young people, for example, are more likely to be renting and so there is a limit to how they can change the space they live in. Policymakers could also introduce flexible energy tariffs, so if people consume energy when there is more of it, rather than less, there is an extra benefit.
“Gamification should provide an enjoyable, joyful experience,” said Nuur. “Then you’re going to continue participating and you’re going to really change your consumption patterns.”
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