CIVIS project's back in these pages to tell you how things have been going since September 2015, when we first wrote about the project, presenting its structure, objectives and actions foreseen.
The project, co-financed by the Seventh framework programme of the European Commission, uses an experiment-driven R&D approach that involves fours pilot neighborhoods, two of which are located in Italy (Trentino region) and two in Sweden (within the city of Stockholm). CIVIS's aim is to contribute to the design of a fairer, more sustainable, energy-optimised smart city. The project focuses on the ICTenabled social dimension to harness the potential of innovation of individuals and collectives with respect to energy prosumption. CIVIS links energy, ICT and society to achieve significant impacts in terms of CO2 reduction and new forms of social innovation.
The first part of the project has been devoted to the deep understating of the state of the art of the interdisciplinary topics included in the structure of the project: smart technologies available on the market, business models already tested, the social behavior of local communities in relation to energy related initiatives, the possible ways social network and ICT can be integrated to local actions.
Projects partners, of course, have also taken action on the test sites, creating contacts with citizens, housing associations, energy cooperatives, local energy initiatives and have involved these subjects into our vision and experimentation.
But today we want to focus on one of the main achievement of the project "YouPower" a social smart grid platform (a hybrid mobile application) designed to explore the potential and challenges of ICT support for social participation, awareness and engagement of household energy consumers (https://app.civisproject.eu).
The design aims to make energy more visible, inform users' energy know-how, promote pro-environmental social norms, and to facilitate users in their day-to-day life to take pro-environmental energy actions together with online communities.
The platform consists of three interrelated parts:
- - The "Action Suggestion" part is designed to provide users with easy access to practical and implementable recommendations (and tips) for energy conservation and to motivate them to learn and practice new energy conservation behaviors until they become new habits that are embedded in the specific context of their every life.
- - The "Housing Cooperative" part is tailored for Stockholm (Sweden) test site where residents belong to local housing cooperative that manage the properties and related issues (including energy). It provides energy information about a user's own and other cooperatives and supports communication between cooperatives' energy managers.
- - The third part, designed for Trento (Italy) test site, mainly focuses on leveraging loadshifting, maximizing self-consumption to match production peaks of locally-installed Renewable Energy Sources. A dynamic time-of-use signal in combination with a scheme for energy donations is designed to assist the shift. In order to make users aware of their consumption patterns, realtime energy consumption data are displayed at appliances (for those installed smart plugs), household and community levels.
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E-mail: info@civisproject.eu
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https://app.civisproject.eu