In terms of the progress beyond the state of the art, the project achieved very significant results, as proved by the articles published in scientific journals. In summary, the project contributed to advance the current state of the art in the following topics: Occupancy forecasting, Motivational drives and user profiles, Load disaggregation, Behaviour forecasting, Gamification platforms and Net-load forecasting.
The results and impacts of the project were deeply affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. The enforced closure of a number of buildings made the baselines unusable and made it impossible to calculate energy savings. Even so, the Consortium made a significant effort to redesign the demonstration activities and achieved the following results and conclusions:
1. Monitoring
The total amount of installed sensors is 89 (30 in Porto, 34 in Barcelona, 25 in Lippe). The number of electricity meters is 241 (160 in Porto, 56 in Barcelona and 25 in Lippe). Additionally, in Barcelona 13 water and gas meters were installed.
2. Behavioural change
The main question we aimed to answer was if the players changed their behaviour due to the ECOplay game and if was this accomplished without a decrease in comfort.The overall results indicate that players’ energy behaviours had improved while their reported comfort levels had remained the same. Players had thus been able to adopt more energy saving behaviour without compromising their comfort levels.
3. Comfort and indoor air quality
The comfort and IAQ did not change significantly before and after the players played the ECOplay game.
4. COVID-19 impacts
We included 5 questions related to COVID-19 and how the closing down of societies on a global scale resulted in dramatic effects on air quality in larger cities. The results indicate that this has indeed been the case and may affect how much value individuals assign to their individual actions.
5. Game and ECOPLAY app evaluation
The post-questionnaire enquired into players’ experiences and opinions about the ECOplay app and the game, including game content which has been used to evaluate the app and game. The section consisted of 14 questions using the 5-point Likert Scale. The total average score for all questions were 76.51% which shows a very good overall evaluation.
6. Outcomes of the focus groups
The focus group participants generally considered themselves to be quite energy aware and especially energy saving aware. Still, several participants agreed that to their surprise they had learnt some new energy consumption and energy saving facts.
7. ECOPLAY app statistical data
The game consists of 14 levels (episodes) and each level takes approximately 15-20 minutes. For the behavioural change analysis, the game was open for 19 weeks. The 25 data subjects included in our sample thus started and completed the game during these 19 weeks.
8. Potential economic impacts
In order to calculate the potential economic impacts caused by the usage of the ECOPlay application, the energy savings have been estimated. Considering the assumptions made, for residential users, the potential savings per household were 151,4€. In tertiary buildings the parameter that best reflects the potential savings is savings per square meter, as tertiary buildings vary greatly in size. For these buildings, annual economic savings were established at 1.6576€/m2.
