176 / 1971-01-01 00:00:00

Steering User Energy Saving Behavior In Building With Comparison

5355,prospective theory,temporal and social comparison

Commercial buildings consume about 20% of US total energy consumption. As the shortage of energy sources and the threats from environmental changes become the most vital global issues, the reduction of commercial building energy consumption is very important for both the continuous development of economy and our daily life. However, a majority of commercial buildings are faced with the problem of split-interest in energy consumption, i.e., the users who consume energy are not responsible to pay the energy bill, and thus have no motivation to save energy. The split-interest causes the abuse of energy in many commercial buildings. This paper presents a comparison based scheme to tackle the problem for commercial buildings. In this scheme, we compare user's cumulative energy consumption in a period of time to a baseline and/or to other user's energy consumption in the same time period, and reward the user if he consumes less energy in the comparison. We introduce a user behavior model to analyze the effectiveness of comparison, and give analytical and numerical results of the comparison process.