The Design and Evaluation of Intelligent Energy Dashboard for Sustainability in the Workplace

Office workers typically don’t know how much energy they consume at work. Since the workers don’t pay the energy bills, they tend to waste energy. To support energy conservation and motivate workers, the Intelligent Dashboard for Occupants (ID-O) was developed using multiple intervention strategies – eco-feedback (self-monitoring, advice, and comparison), remote controls, and automated controls. The baseline data was collected for fourteen weeks from eighty office workers and ID-Os with different features were deployed for seven weeks. The results show that the group with all the features (eco-feedback, remote controls, automated controls) made the biggest energy savings at 35.4%, the group that had eco-feedback and the remote controls showed 20.2% energy savings, the feedback only group achieved 9% energy savings, and the last group (the control group) produced 3.6% energy savings. The automated control feature produced the biggest energy savings, and was most effective in energy management for lights and phones, but not for computers and monitors.