An energy awareness study in a Smart City lessons learned

The SmartCity concept is becoming widely accepted and describes the usage of ICT for increased quality of life and also for a sustainable usage of natural resources. This paper describes a system architecture for monitoring of electrical energy consumption, and visualization of usage patterns to raise users' awareness of their energy usage which we field trialled over several months. The information collected of each household includes kWh, emission of carbon dioxide emissions and it also relates a household's consumption to other households attending the trial. Our results indicate that a fraction of the participants was interested in a detailed comparison with others whereas other participants had their main interest in not performing worse than the average household. Further, a large fraction had a demand for knowing the total energy usage of their household through an easily accessible visualization. These results indicate that there is support to embed sensing and feedback services to daily life for involving the residents of a SmartCity more.