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App idea: Using gaming and social media to reduce your energy footprint

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Energy footprint

SAP runs an event called InnoJam at its developer TechEd conferences. The SAP InnoJam events are held during the weekend prior to TechEd. During these events, people from the SAP community compete against each other in teams building working prototypes of solutions to real business cases, using SAP technologies.

SAP solicit ideas for business cases to be developed at these InnoJams – I added one this morning on building a residential energy management application. The application would use a combination of gaming techniques (leader boards, achievement badges, etc) and sharing to social networks to keep customers engaged and incented to try their best to reduce their energy use.

Here’s my submission:

Energy management applications being rolled out by utility companies have a very short Mean Time to Junk Drawer (MTJD) – they are ‘all shiny’ for the first couple of weeks but the shine quickly wears off and they are soon put away in the proverbial Junk Drawer never to be opened again.

How do you make energy management applications more engaging, bringing utility company customers back again and again to try to improve on their previous energy reduction steps? You do it by turning it into a game and allowing customers to share their progress on their social network of choice!

SAP have a new application for utility customers called Smart Meter Analytics which runs on HANA. The flood of data which will be coming from Smart Meters means HANA is necessary to do meaningful analytics on Smart Meter data (Centrica talk of going from their current 70m smart meter reads per annum to 30bn when all of their smart meters are rolled out – that’s a lot of data).

Smart meters give far more granular reads on energy consumption, allowing for residential energy management applications to be built and indeed SAP’s Smart Meter Analytics application has an Energy Efficiency Scorecard for residential customers.

But, if you build an application for energy management which allows people to compete against each other. If you introduce point scoring, leaderboards, and achievement badges and add to it the ability to share your progress with your social networks (a bit like FourSquare), then the application becomes far more compelling.

Also, the mobile app would want to have a way to check energy consumption remotely, and if a device has been left on (TV, aircon, oven, etc.), remote power-down from the mobile app.

Now, for utility companies to get this to really fly, they could offer prizes to schools in their locale – the school district with the greatest energy reductions gets a new energy efficient computer lab, or new energy efficient lighting, or… (you get the idea) – pester power from the pupils in the schools on their parents, combined with educating the younger generation on the importance of energy reduction is a major win-win!

The cool thing about this is that because it is based on the utility company’s Smart Meter Analytics, it is the customer’s actual energy use, not pledges, or estimates – so reductions reported are real, and realtime.

What do you think? Do you think this is a good idea?

Photo credit Tom Raftery

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Centrica’s Smart Meter Analytics application could make energy management compelling

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As I have mentioned here previously, Smart Meters are going to bring a flood of data to utility companies which will need to be properly managed and which can be a source of intelligence for the utility, if they mine it well.

At the recent SAP Sapphire Now conference, UK Energy retailer Centrica showcased their Smart Meter Analytics application running on SAP’s HANA. HANA is SAP’s in-memory computing solution (In-memory computing moves data off traditional storage on servers and into RAM, providing a performance boost over having to read the data off disks).

Centrica are the largest single instance utility on an SAP system with 18 million residential accounts for and one million business accounts. Right now they are billing residential accounts every three months and they are managing 75 million meter reads per annum.

With the move to smart meters, Centrica will take electricity reads every 30 minutes and gas reads once per day. This means a shift from 75 million meter reads per annum to 120 billion meter reads a year. 120 billion – that’s billion with a b. That’s a phenomenal amount of data to have to deal with. Doing any kind of traditional analytics on a data set that large would very quickly get totally bogged down. One of the interesting things about HANA however is that the performance scales linearly with the hardware. If it’s starting to slow a bit with 120 billion meter reads, throw a couple of extra terabytes of ram and servers at it and hey presto you are back in business, or so the theory goes!

In the demo above, Centrica are using the analytics to examine their customer segmentation. They can look at the energy profile of similar businesses in a specific area and where there are anomalies, they can work with those businesses to help them cut their energy consumption until it is more in line with their peers. Increasing pressures to be energy-efficient and to reduce carbon footprints are being looked on by Centrica as an opportunity to open an energy services business, going to customers to help them to become more energy-efficient. The Smart Meter Analytics application is going to be crucial for this new practice within Centrica.

Centrica's Energy Efficiency Scorecard

Centrica's Energy Efficiency Scorecard

In the residential market the Smart Meter Analytics app presents householders with an Energy Efficiency Scorecard. This facilitates charting actual usage patterns against the various tariffs Centrica offers to find the optimal rate plan. The score card also allows home-owners to compare their energy efficiency with similar households in the same area.

This is an impressive use of Smart Meter analytics and it presents hugely useful information but to avoid a short MTKD (Mean Time To Kitchen Drawer – the time it takes for people to get bored with this app and metaphorically stuff it in the kitchen drawer), the scorecard has to keep homeowners engaged. There are several ways of doing this. One of main ones would be to bring in some gamification – make a game of it. The Scorecard could set energy reduction targets for people to meet in the next set period, allot points or awards for achieving reduction targets, build social media in for sharing achievements and put up a leaderboard to add some real competition to the game.

Energy management applications to-date have suffered from the fact that they were working with estimated data a lot of the time, from lack of a significant networked dataset and from a lack of a usable analytics engine. Large energy retailers, like Centrica, have the opportunity now to change that and to make energy management in the home compelling. Let’s hope they make it so.

Disclosure – SAP paid my travel and expenses to attend Sapphire Now.