PARticipatory platform for sustainable ENergy and Transport Systems

The current transition of the energy domain towards a decentralized and distributed system is advancing consumers and prosumers as key players in the achievement of energy savings and efficiency in their neighbourhoods and cities. our cities. Smart meters,as cornerstones of the smart grid vision and enablers of new energy services, are increasingly rolled out across the whole Europe and worldwide. People will be able to monitor energy consumption at home and to access enhanced information on their own energy usage, thus increasing individual and community awareness that can enable citizens to take action and reduce their ecological footprints. By accompanying this process, the PARticipatory platform for sustainable ENergy managemenT project(PARENT) aims to understand the social acceptability of these innovations. It will develop a platform for participatory energy management by relying on sub-metering devices and novel analytics. It will involve local stakeholders through Living Labs and participants from the local community into real life testing phase. The pilot and analysis stages of the project has been completed. Final project deliverables and reports have been produced. In Bergen we are still writing up the final academic analysis in the form of academic papers: two are about to be submitted, and one is undergoing review.

Målet for PARENT var å utvikle en plattform for økt deltakelse i strømsparende tiltak. Dette ble gjennomført i tre pilot-prosjekter i tre byer: Bergen, Amsterdam og Brussel. De tre pilot-prosjektene hadde ca 200 aktive deltaker: husholdninger som installerte, brukte og diskuterte en overvåknings-enhet for strøm. Hver pilot hadde en styringsgruppe, med deltakelse fra kommuner, sivilsamfunn, fornybar-selskaper og teknologiutviklere og strømbransje. Bergens rolle var å levere perspektiver og analyser knyttet til sosial aksept, brukerperspektiver og ansvarlig forskning og innovasjon (RRI). Vi gjennomførte tre runder med fokusgrupper, fire møter med styringsgruppen, flere offentlige arrangement, og sirkulerte i alt 14 nyhetsbrev. Prosjektet har hatt effekt i og med interaksjon med et bredt spekter av aktører. Virkninger på politikk og energi-vaner er vanskeligere å spore. Akademisk vil prosjektet ha virkninger på forskning om energi og samfunn, i Norge og internasjonalt.

The PARENT project will increase, in a socially acceptable manner, the engagement of individuals in the responsible management of their own electricity usage. The project, executed in a constant and close dialogue with stakeholders, and having analysed the state-of-the-art in the field, will develop an innovative and marketable platform for participatory energy management, fuelled by novel analytics, visualisation and gamification techniques to stimulate behavioural change. It will adapt to local contexts of four targeted cities Amsterdam, Bergen, Barcelona and Brussels. In parallel, it will offer guidelines for increasing energy efficiency for multiple stakeholders at multiple levels in Europe. Both the development of the platform and the making of guidelines will be supported by an analysis of governance and social acceptability (ie. users acceptance) in the four cities. The analysis of governance of smart meters and the making of the guidelines will be informed by recent scholarship on Responsible Research and Innovation, as well as a prior mapping of the concept of "smart cities" in the different contexts of the four cities.