User engagement for thermal energy-efficient behavior in office buildings using dashboards and gamification

With growing concerns about climate change and increasing energy costs, energy-efficient use of buildings offers an opportunity to decrease CO₂ emissions and costs. The behavior of building occupants plays a significant role in the process of improving this efficiency both for new and existing buildings. In this work, we introduce a suite of web-based software applications that aim to encourage thermal energy-efficient occupant behavior in an office environment under the Living Lab Energy Campus (LLEC) initiative, using the campus of Forschungszentrum Jülich as a demonstration. The applications in the suite allow building occupants to visualize their energy demand and automatically control heating in the offices. Behavior change motivation is provided through the related concepts of gamification and serious games through the evaluation of behavioral energy efficiency reported as energy penalties, as wells as through real-time feedback and recommendations. An experiment was designed to test the interventions in a real-world setting, where the focus was on the setpoint temperature and ventilation habits of the occupants. The mean daily energy penalties in the ventilation intervention group was 65% lower than that of its control group (1.66 kWh vs. 4.67 kWh), with even lower penalties in the ”activated” subgroup of the intervention group (0.74 kWh). In another test building that considered both ventilation and setpoint temperature, activated offices had 56% lower daily mean energy penalties than the control (1.91 kWh vs. 4.35 kWh), while in the pilot building, the energy penalties in the activated offices was 40% less than that of its control group (1.61 kWh vs. 2.94 kWh). All these effects were statistically significant and with large effect sizes. Furthermore, year-on-year thermal energy savings of about 18% (11.8 MWh) were realized in the pilot building where occupancy-driven heating was introduced.