The Our Energy app is a simulation tool to experience having solar electricity. It was developed at ETH from September 2018 to September 2019 in a research context at the chair of Information Architecture.
It was created with the intention to test people’s behaviour in the presence of a scarce resource, in this case, solar electricity produced by a community PV system. We wanted to test if the community set up had better influence on the results in comparison with the individual set up. It turns out that, the community set up also requires greater efforts in the development side, and it was not possible to fully convey the community without developing a great online infrastructure for the community. We couldn’t use the app/game to test the effect between individual and community participation.
Although it is not possible to explore different effects between individual and community PV systems, the app it is still a tool with very strong learning capabilities.
A couple of issues happen when using non-controllable renewable energy, which is the case of electric produced by solar radiation. To help minimising the issue, solar produced electricity should be ideally consumed when being produced.
The Our Energy app achieve then two important learning goals:
- Provide users with a fine granular information of their electricity consumption;
- Provide users with the opportunity to experiment having solar PV, without any prior investment.
Within the app the users experiment the complexity of having solar PV systems – specially without batteries – and learn from it. By helping users to understand a complex task, we help decrease the perceived complexity in implementing renewable systems.
See the presentation of the project below: