Designing live energy performance feedback for public buildings in Leicester

Buildings represent a huge potential for energy savings, in the UK buildings account for 45 % of energy consumption. Buildings owned and managed by the public sector make up more than 10 % of the EU building stock. In recent years there has been much interest in the use of feedback systems to encourage energy behaviour change but very little literature on the design of feedback systems in the non-domestic setting. The EU “SMARTSPACES” project is developing ICT services using data generated from smart metering systems in public buildings at 11 pilot sites across Europe. The SMARTSPACES system being developed in the Leicester pilot site will provide users with a live, half-hourly comparison of energy (electricity and gas) performance across 20 public buildings. A new indicator of energy performance is proposed. The indicator relates consumption for the current half-hour with the distribution of equivalent historical values. The indicator is robust and unambiguous, reflecting progress in energy saving activity, normalised to each building. The context in which the indicator is presented is also described along with the wider project which is intended to support a change of organisational culture to an active, energy aware community of staff and visitors communicating with energy professionals in the context of ubiquitous building energy performance information.