A persuasive feedback support system for energy conservation and carbon emission reduction in campus residential buildings

• Proposed a persuasive feedback support system (PFSS) for energy usage reduction.
• Energy delegates motivate students in campus residents to reduce energy consumption.
• A combination of PFSS and energy delegate resulted in higher reduction of 91.45 kWh.
• PFSS implements open source management interface for raw electric data collection.
• Energy delegate motivates the students to reduce their energy without any incentives.

There is a need for energy conservation mechanisms, especially in university campuses, as students do not have any direct feedback on their energy consumptions, which leads to excess usages. There are few existing approaches aiming to reduce electricity usages in higher education institutions through real-time feedback applications. These approaches mainly apply student experimental studies with incentives (gift reward). Their feedback systems present data only in near real time using data loggers and Modbus data collector, which are characterised with a slow and unstable data transfer rate. Furthermore, they are not designed for long-term deployment in a wider campus energy management environment. Thus, the challenges for reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions in the higher education sector still remain.To address these challenges, we have designed, configured and implemented a robust persuasive feedback support system (PFSS) to facilitate energy conservation and carbon emission reduction. This paper presents the complete architecture of the proposed PFSS, its system interface and the real time measurement output strategies. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed system and to assess its performance in comparison with the previous systems, we used the student halls of residence at the University of Kent as a use case scenario.