Buildings are responsible for approximately 40% of energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions in Europe. Building users have the potential to reduce energy consumption about 6-10% and improve indoor environmental conditions and comfort through behavioural changes. However, motivating behavioural change requires specific methods and strategies to convince people and be effective over the time. It is demonstrated that solutions to address this issue must be appealing, pedagogic and user-friendly, otherwise, rebound effects could provoke even higher energy consumption levels than before the application of these methods. In addition, people are energy users of multiple buildings that they usually visit, live or work on it and thus, the energy behaviour change should be motivated in different contexts (building users and facilities) and roles or profiles (occupants, facility managers, owner, student, teachers…). These issues make the challenge more complex and require solutions that must be focused on social, technical and commercial aspects. Other issues related and addressed by eTEACHER project are:
-People are not connected or aware about building facilities and energy issues are not visible.
-There are not comprehensive solutions that connect BEMS and building occupants (interoperability).
-Buildings has in general low automation and monitoring level.
-There are not prediction tools and tools focused on comfort and users’ feedback.
Overall, initiatives to reduce buildings energy consumption entails less CO2 emissions, what has a positive effect on the climate change and reduce the European dependence of fossil fuels. In addition, the application of energy behaviour change methods allows increasing the energy visibility and energy literacy to extend the positive effects of trained users to any building in different circumstances. Such changes aim to improve the building occupants’ wellbeing, productivity, health and comfort, what turns into better satisfaction of end-users. But not only end-users (building occupants) are benefited of the energy behavioural change, since the economic sectors related to ICT building solutions, building automation, SW developers, facility management and SME can take advantage of new and advanced solutions in energy efficiency.
The overall goal of eTEACHER is to empower energy end-users to achieve energy savings and improve the buildings comfort and health conditions through enabling behavioural change, considering different roles/profiles (occupants, facility managers, householders…) depending on the building they usually visit, live or work respectively.
