Energy Conservation through Product Integrated Persuasive Feedback Using Smart Sensors in a University Campus

The world’s energy consumption is increasing. This has been attributed to global warming and increase in CO2 emission. Experts in this area are emphasising on the need to conserve energy both in industry and residential areas. This is especially true in University campuses where students do not have any direct insight or feedback on their energy consumption.

Currently, there are few approaches aiming to reduce electricity usages in higher education institutions by providing students with feedback on their electricity consumption rates. These approaches suffer from the lack of motivations by the students to change their energy usage behaviours. To address this issue, they mainly provide students with incentives (gift rewards). However, their feedback systems present data only in near real time using data loggers and Modbus data collector, which are characterised with a slow and unstable data transfer rate. Furthermore, they are not designed for long-term deployment in a wider campus energy management environment. Thus, the challenges for reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions in the higher education sector still remain.

To adequately address these challenges, a novel initiative was developed and implemented in this thesis. It includes a dedicated interface design, hardware and software configurations to form a robust methodology known as: Integrated Persuasive Technology and Energy Delegate (IPTED). Energy delegates were appointed to facilitate energy conservation and carbon emission reduction. This thesis presents the complete architecture of the IPTED, its system interface and the real-time measurement feedback and output strategies. To demonstrate its applicability and to assess its effectiveness, the student halls of residence at the University of Kent were used as a use case scenario to test the system with psychology tailored initiatives.

The deployment of IPTED in the student residential halls shows that, instantaneous real-time energy feedback with a visual interface when combined with a human factor (energy delegate) can provide significant energy savings. Overall, the intervention revealed that, the use of real-time feedback system reduces energy consumption significantly when compared to baseline readings. Interestingly, it was found that applying the combination of real-time feedback system with energy delegate in the 8 experimental halls resulted in high energy consumption reduction of 37% when compared to the baseline. This amounts to the savings of 1526.73 kWh of energy and 800.92 kg of CO2. On the contrary, the 8 non-experimental halls, which were exposed to the real-time feedback and weekly email alert, resulted in 3.5% energy consumption reduction when compared to the baseline. This amounts to the savings of only 165.00 kWh of energy and 86.56 kg of CO2. These results show the novelty and significance of our contributions towards energy consumption and CO2 emission reduction. 3.5% energy consumption reduction when compared to the baseline. This amounts to the savings of only 165.00 kWh of energy and 86.56 kg of CO2.