Advizzo consortium awarded £900k Eurostars grant for R&D project
Advizzo, in collaboration with BEN Energy and the University of Bamberg, is delighted to have secured a Eurostars grant worth nearly €900k to complete an 18 month R&D project.
During the R&D project, which launched in August 2020, the consortium will work together to deliver an advanced prototype of a unique customer engagement and data analytics platform designed to influence significantly improved energy consumption behaviors in the residential sector – and in doing so address the recognized limitations of smart meters.
The challenge
Despite >40 millions smart meter units being deployed across the EU, the impact of smart meters in influencing residential consumption behavior has fallen significantly short of expectations – just 3% reduction per household. Studies show that the key reason for the shortfall is that simply communicating consumption data to homeowners does not motivate the hoped for behavioral change required to reduce consumption.
Research shows that a substantial increase in energy saving can be achieved if the information communicated to each household is truly tailored – for example, it benchmarks the household’s water or energy consumption against comparable households.
This is known as presenting ‘social norms’ and it forms the basis of Advizzo’s mission, philosophy, product and service. Julien Lancha, CCO, Advizzo comments, “Our mission is to revolutionize how people think about their water and energy consumption to enable a truly sustainable way of life. Advizzo has every interest in developing a cloud based software solution that integrates behavioral science and analytics to create personalized multi-channel experiences for customers to save energy.”
The solution
In collaboration with BEN Energy, which has an established energy analytics platform, and the University of Bamberg, which has led academic research on the impact of targeted household communication on energy behavior, Advizzo will undertake the 18 month R&D project to deliver a prototype customer engagement platform that combines big data analytics, cutting-edge machine learning techniques and behavioral intervention.
The scalable and customizable solution, deployed via an SaaS model either as a standalone ‘white label’ product or with APIs, will offer significant advancement on industry partners’ current service offerings and for the sector as a whole. It is hoped that it has the potential for future exploitation as a consumer product.
The projected benefits that the platform will deliver include:
- Potential to achieve additional 6-9% P/A savings per household (2-3x that of current smart meter impact which ranges from 2-3% per household equating to €309 for electricity saving).
- Improved accuracy around forecasting customer demand.
- Improved debt management (>50 million people in the EU affected by energy poverty; potential to better identify/support vulnerable customers).
- Improved reputation for Energy companies towards environmental sustainability, improved case for smart meter roll-out.
- Support the transition between service providers (recognized limitation)
Operational cost reduction by ~20% (e.g. call volume reduction for bill inquire) - Regulatory contribution e.g. EU Energy Efficiency Directive, which targets a saving of 1.5% sold energy per household/year.
Julien adds:
“This project will generate real operational value for utilities through increased customer digital engagement and satisfaction, behavioral demand-side management, and customer adoption of efficient products and services. We are very excited to be collaborating on this project with BEN Energy and the University of Bamberg. Together we are uniquely placed to successfully deliver the proposed work and address this recognized gap in the market.”