Abstract
This paper analyzes the impact of an innovative approach based on gamification to promote reduced energy consumption in social housing. The game was developed and validated under the auspices of the EU-funded project EnerGAware-Energy Game for Awareness of energy efficiency in social housing communities in an affordable housing pilot located in Plymouth (United Kingdom). The results showed that the future exploitation of the game holds important energy- and emissions-saving potential. Assuming that the game is distributed freely by European energy providers to their domestic end-users, the game was found to be able to save more than 48.9 secondary terawatt-hours per year (TWhs) and 18.8 million tons of CO2e annually, contributing up to around 8% to the target set for the European buildings sector to keep global warming under 2 °C. The results also showed that the game is highly feasible from the energy point of view, even when we consider the energy consumed upstream, due to its low cumulative energy demand and its potential for household energy reduction. The results of this research provide helpful information for private and public stakeholders, as they contribute to determining the sustainability of promoting energy saving through gaming.
Highlights
According to the latest figures [1], the buildings sector was responsible for 41.77% of the final energy consumption at EU level in 2017
This paper aims at covering this gap and to do so, it relies on the results obtained by EnerGAware project (a €2 million funded research project) during the deployment of the Energy Cat: The House of Tomorrow serious game in the UK social housing pilot, as this is the most recent and complicated serious game for household energy efficiency according to Chatzigeorgiou and Andreou [35]
The game energy requirements were estimated under a life cycle approach using the cumulative energy demand (CED) method [42]
Summary
According to the latest figures [1], the buildings sector (including residential and tertiary sector buildings) was responsible for 41.77% of the final energy consumption at EU level in 2017. “Lowering energy use in this sector is a key strategy for achieving ambitious medium- and long-term energy and climate targets in the EU and its individual countries” [2], as stated in the European Union’s 2030 climate and energy policy framework [3]. Within this context, the European Commission “has recognized the potential role that. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can play in improving the energy performance of buildings in several high-level policy documents” [4,5,6,7,8,9]. Further ICT applications within the energy-saving context are energy information systems aimed at encouraging energy conservation behaviors
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