Assessment of the Social Electricity Online Platform Tools and their Potential Impact on European Citizens

George Kourtis
2016 Journal of Sustainable Architecture and Civil Engineering  
JSACE 3/16 Through the Social Electricity Online Platform (SEOP) European project, four learning modules, educational content and online eco-feedback platforms have been developed, to raise the awareness and knowledge of citizens about energy, the environment and sustainability. The platform allows European citizens to become educated on energy-saving practices and techniques, including the use of renewable technologies at their home. Moreover, through the Social Electricity application, people
more » ... may become aware of their electrical energy consumption by means of comparisons with the corresponding electrical consumption of their friends, as well as with the total consumption in the street, neighbourhood, village, city and country where they live, in a collaborative and social environment. In this paper, a pilot study performed in eight European countries involving more than 300 European citizens is presented, in order to demonstrate the influence of online learning modules and ecofeedback platforms on the everyday lives of people, in terms of rational energy use and energy savings. In this pilot, participants have been divided into two groups: the former uses the four learning modules available on the SEOP platform and then the Social Electricity application, whereas the latter uses only the Social Electricity application. This paper describes our overall findings after three months, exploring the completeness and educational value of the learning modules, and the potential of Social Electricity as an effective online tool for personal energy management. The results also evaluate the impact, behavioural change and the increase on energy awareness among the two groups, as well as the general effectiveness and acceptance of the platform. Journal of Sustainable Architecture and Civil Engineering 2016/3/16 Without a doubt, concerns on environmental protection due to the high greenhouse gases emissions is today a key driver for the global need for electrical energy saving. Nowadays, people realize that the electricity they use originates mainly from coal or hydrocarbon-based power plants, which emit carbon-dioxide which is severely harmful to humans and the environment. Moreover, energy should be conserved since we are consuming a disproportionate amount of energy and that day is not far when all our non-renewable energy fuel resources will be exhausted forcing us to rely just on renewable sources (Bhattacharya 2014). Apart from the above, electrical energy saving also helps electricity consumers to save money and mitigates the numerous adverse environmental and social impacts associated with energy production and consumption. These include air pollution, acid rain and global warming, oil spills and water pollution, loss of wilderness areas, construction of new power plants, foreign energy dependence and the risk of international conflict over energy supplies. In addition, proper energy use extends the lifetime of electrical equipment and reduces the maintenance cost by operating less hours and at less than maximum capacity (Gavaskar et al. 2012). In this paper, the SEOP project and the online tools of the SEOP platform are presented in Section 2. Further, in Section 3, a pilot study performed in eight European countries involving more than 300 European citizens is described, demonstrating the influence of online learning modules and eco-feedback platforms on the everyday lives of people, in terms of rational energy use and energy savings. The results of the pilot test are presented in Section 4, whereas the conclusions are summarized in Section 5.
doi:10.5755/j01.sace.16.3.15803 fatcat:nlx5nrjcizbjfh2bp6jkkgh5au