• Energy Research

Abstract Office buildings consume a significant amount of energy that can be reduced through behavioral change. Gamification offers the means to influence the energy consumption related to the activities of the office users. This paper presents a new mobile gamification platform to foster the adoption of energy efficient behaviors in office buildings. The gamification platform is a mobile application with multiple types of dashboards, such as (1) an information dashboard to increase the awareness of the users about their energy consumption and footprint, (2) a gaming dashboard to engage users in real-time energy efficiency competitions, (3) a leaderboard to promote peer competition and comparison, and (4) a message dashboard to send tailor-made messages about energy efficiency opportunities. The engagement and gamification strategies embedded in these dashboards exploit economic, environmental, and social motivations to stimulate office users to adopt energy efficient behaviors without compromising their comfort and autonomy levels. The gamification platform was demonstrated in an office building environment. The results suggest electricity savings of 20%.

Smart Grids have an important role in the increase of observability and controllability of the distribution grid. This paradigm enables the integration of more Distributed Energy Resources (DER). Emerging market players, such as flexibility operators or aggregators, are also able to provide additional degrees of flexibility allowing more local controllability. This leads to a situation in which the DSOs need to change the way they operate and plan their distribution networks. Moreover, they need to perform an active coordination with the TSOs and existing/future market mechanisms. In order to tackle this issue, two innovative tools were developed. The first one called Interval Constrained Power Flow (ICPF), estimates the flexibility range at the TSO-DSO boundary (primary substations) by aggregating the distribution network flexibility in order to enable a technical and economic evaluation of the flexibility from the bulk power system point of view. The second one, Sequential Optimal Power Flow (SOPF), aims to minimize the costs associated with the activation of flexibilities on distribution networks. The process searches for the optimal values through the network reconfiguration and the control of voltage and reactive power.