The potential of nudging and gamification for reducing energy demand in the residential sector

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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Insinööritieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
Date
2016-03-21
Department
Major/Subject
Innovative and Sustainable Energy Engineering
Mcode
IA3025
Degree programme
Master’s Programme in Energy and HVAC Technology
Language
en
Pages
47 + 8
Series
Abstract
The threat of human induced climate change is imminent. The reason is an ever increasing demand for energy and products, producing more and more greenhouse gas emissions. Everybody needs to take responsibility now. The estimations are that with 2% annual energy savings from residential households 12TWh and 3.3 billion metric tonnes of CO2 can be saved per year. Greenely, a startup from KIC InnoEnergy, wants to engage residential households to change their energy behaviour at home. They combine a smartphone application with the smart meter infrastructure to reduce households energy demand. Changing behaviour is complicated and research prior to this thesis revealed that information and economic incentives alone are not sufficient. A simple and proven technique to change behaviour is Nudging A gentle push in the right direction while leaving the freedom of choice. A popular example is a printed fly in the men's urinal. It nudges them to aim at the fly. The cleaning costs were reduced by 80% at the Schiphol Airport Amsterdam. Without application usage change is impossible for Greenely. Their main contact tool to households is a smartphone application. The smartphone market is vast and competition between applications is strong. Therefore the system outline needs to precede Nudging for ongoing engagement and long term change. To achieve that Gamification practices are implemented. It is the incorporation of game design into non-gaming contexts to achieve engagement through motivation and fun. This master thesis is done in cooperation with Greenely and focuses on residential demand reduction schemas, Nudging and Gamification. The aim is to improve their actual application and create an outline for an improved version that promotes long term behaviour change. The result incorporates the most suitable features from the relevant topics and enables long term change.
Description
Supervisor
Järvinen, Mika
Thesis advisor
Lundqvist, Per
Keywords
energy demand, nudging, gamification, electricity consumption, demand reduction, energy
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