INTERVIEW
Greenely: Gamifying energy consumption and saving users money Greenely is a mobile application that gives users the ability to fully control their energy behaviours and make decisions that can save them money and reduce their carbon footprint. International Innovation caught up with Greenely’s CEO Tanmoy Bari at INNOVEIT 2016 to talk about how the app works Can you introduce Greenely? We are using persuasive technologies underpinned by behavioural science in order to change people’s energy behaviour. To achieve this, we created an application called Greenely that helps people reduce their energy consumption. What inspired you to start looking into the space of energy consumption reduction? When I was doing my Master’s thesis, I was looking at the smart city concept for one of the most sustainable cities in Sweden – Stockholm Royal Seaport. My job was to combine several solutions into one concept that did not require a lot of investment and to help people live more sustainably. During my thesis, I saw that there was a ton of potential opportunities in the field of energy visualisation. For example, I thought that the ideas that were already on the market were not scalable and that they were hardware intensive. Greenely usese imagery that shows a planet that dies as energy consumption within a house increases. Why did you decide to use this visualisation? In order for Greenely to operate, it pulls a lot of data from many sources; most of this data doesn’t mean anything on its own. Imagine I told you that you consumed 248 kilowatt hours of energy – that would mean nothing to you.
So we asked ourselves: how do we make a kilowatt hour tangible? My team and I believed that a planet could really visualise that concept. Not only does the planet become an easy-to-understand, visual representation of your energy usage, the app itself also gives you the ability to go into the analytics of your energy use. It shows you patterns in your usage. Why did you decide to integrate concepts of gamification into the app? Energy can be quite boring – you have to make it fun and appealing. Gamification makes the app more fun, appealing and sticky. We didn’t want the app to be appealing only one time; we wanted to get people to use it over a long period of time. Does the app provide advice on changes users can make in their everyday lives to reduce energy consumption and save money? Yes. When the user gives us consent to track their data, we can combine it with data that already exists and new data from their household meters. Looking at the energy loads, we can decipher their activities. For example, we can estimate how much energy is spent on kitchen activities in your household. From that, we can provide tailored advice – both in terms of investment and behaviour – that is specific to the household. Greenely is clearly aggregating a lot of data for the individual user. Is this data of use to energy utilities? Energy utilities notoriously do not have a good relationship with their users; for example, a lot of people in Sweden don’t even know who their energy provider is. But Greenely can change that. So, in addition to having a value proposition for the users, we are also closing the gap between the users and the energy providers. We are helping them create a social relationship that has been absent to date.
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INTERNATIONAL INNOVATION