Conserving energy at home can have a real impact – on the environment, and on energy bills. The EU’s Energy 2020 policy set a target of reducing emissions by 20%, while also enabling consumers to switch energy providers and monitor energy usage. Today, across the EU, individual households consume almost 30% of all energy expended. But, most households are unaware of their exact energy consumption until their aggregated bill arrives, once per month, making it difficult to calculate and refine usage. And, these monthly statements do not provide enough insight into specific, practical ways a household can decrease their energy usage.
The EU encourages scalable energy efficiency tools and practices, and has initiatives in place to upgrade millions of electricity meters to smart energy meters by 2020. Thus far, installed smart meters have mostly benefited the utility companies and grid operators; the benefits have not trickled down to European households as intended.
In order for individuals to be informed and make energy adaptations, the consumer needs: (1) visual representation of usage at shorter intervals to be able to analyse how a specific energy trade-off will personally affect their household, (2) the ability to perform their own cost-benefit analysis and model those savings to make informed decisions, and (3) to feel personally accountable for their energy consumption and, conversely, directly responsible for energy conservation.
Greenely addresses these needs, to provide a visual representation of energy usage, while promoting sustainable energy consumption through behavioural data analysis and gamification. Greenely is a mobile application that translates raw energy data from smart meters into algorithmic visuals of consumption patterns by hour, day, or month; and available instantaneously to end-users. Not only does Greenely draw on the latest behaviour science and gamification practices, but it is also unique because it has a software-based approach. Other hardware-based solutions require a financial investment to install the equipment while Greenely doesn’t require a financial investment for add-on hardware and instead provides cost-effective and scalable software, with easy-to-understand snapshots, making it a much more economically viable solution.
The objective of this feasibility study was to analyse the potenital for an expansion of Greenely's energy efficiency platform in Europe, with a focus on starting in the UK. A massive rollout of smart gas and electricity meters is currently underway in the UK with a total of 26 millions residential smart meters to be installed by year 2020. This creates a vast opportunity to access this data and use it to improve households' knowledge of their energy consumption and motivate them to decrease it.
