1) Gaming technologies in non-leisure contexts:
User engagement is the most challenging issue, which hinders the large-scale demand response (DR) market growth and especially at the residential sector, which represents approximately 40% of the overall DR market share. Many DR programs are already in place harvesting considerable benefits in today’s liberalized electricity markets, but it is obvious that DR markets will not be boosted, unless users comprehend their role and potential benefits as a result of changing their everyday energy behavior. By exploiting, integrating and advancing technologies such as gaming, gamification and social networking, SOCIALENERGY will fast bridge the gap between successful trials of DR programs and wide user adoption. We believe that the proposed SOCIALENERGY platform is the most promising bottom-up learning and education way, which may lead to widespread user adoption.
2) Education and social inclusion:
SOCIALENERGY facilitates and deepens the communication between stakeholders as: i) utilities and ESCOs, ii) companies related with manufacturing and marketing of energy efficiency products and services (e.g. electric appliances, building renovation companies, etc.), iii) public authorities (e.g. municipalities, ministries, etc.) that own a lot of buildings (e.g. schools, hospitals, government, etc.), iv) grassroots community organizations active to environmental and energy efficiency issues. In this way, SOCIALENERGY can be seen not only as a platform towards energy efficiency, but also as a tool towards social inclusion and even electronic democracy though interaction, bottom-up learning and education. Finally, as DR and generally liberalized energy markets involve quite complex processes, whose operation aspects and potential gains are difficult to be understood from the majority of the society and especially for “weak” social groups (e.g. low education, elder people, low-income citizens etc.), SOCIALENERGY paves the way towards familiarizing people with good practices on energy efficiency via the exploitation of widespread social networks.
3) New businesses and applications generated by SOCIALENERGY’s innovations:
SOCIALENERGY bridges the gap between each emerging progressive electric utility and its customers by providing a Gamified Social Marketing as a Service (GSMaaS) solution that focuses in the easy and deep communication among them towards the widespread adoption from the latter of advanced DR energy programs that the former provides. Moreover, through its intelligent and advanced recommendation and advertisement services, SOCIALENERGY facilitates its ECs to select the utility that best fits to their needs, interests and habits. We can call this process Utility Selection as a Service (USaaS) and we believe that USaaS will highly motivate utilities towards more advanced and personalized Energy Programs (EPs). From the customers’ perspective, USaaS will act as a “tutor” that will help them to lower their energy bills and live in a more environmental friendly way.
