EnerGAware Project Kicks-off in Barcelona

The kick-off meeting of the EnerGAware (Energy Game for Awareness of energy efficiency in social housing communities) project took place February 18-19, at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain. The kick-off meeting had the participation of representatives of the project partners as well as the Project Office, which will follow the project from the European Executive Agency for SMEs (EASME), which manages the Energy Efficiency topic of the challenge ‘Secure, Clean and Efficient Energy’ of Horizon 2020. At the meeting CISTER was represented by Luis Miguel Pinho.

The EnerGAware project intends to achieve a 15-30% energy consumption and emissions reduction in a social housing pilot and increase the social tenants’ understanding and engagement in energy efficiency through the development of a serious game that will be linked to the actual energy consumption (smart meter data) of the game user’s home and embedded in social media and networking tools. The demonstrator pilot will be carried out in Plymouth, UK, with the participation of 100 homes.

One of the main focus of the meeting was the planning of the deployment of the energy monitoring infrastructure, a work package led by CISTER. In the first phase, the monitoring infrastructure will allow to collect pre-pilot data which will afterwards be used for comparison.

EnerGAware is led by the Group of Construction Research and Innovation of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain. Other partners are the game developer Fremen Corp, France, the embedded platform provider Advantic SIS, Spain, the Building Performance Analysis and Sustainability group & the Psychology group of the Plymouth University, UK, the Devon and Cornwall social housing provider, UK, and the EDF Energy R&D UK Centre, UK. In parallel with the pilot integration work package, CISTER is also responsible for the design and implementation of the data collection and processing real-time middleware.