Pilot study of 'Our Energy', an app designed to facilitate self-consumption of community solar photovoltaic systems

Distributed energy from photovoltaic (PV) systems are an important part of the 2000-Watt-Society and Swiss Energy Strategy 2050 targets. However, as more PV is added to the grid, it becomes more important to intelligently use on-site electricity generation. There is also a recent focus on communities as they have better load aggregation potential from multiple tenants to increase overall self-consumption. Additional potentials exists when introducing PV systems in communities from social comparisons or competitions. The first critical step is to have an effective communication platform with real-time electricity production and consumption to show resource availability and usage at the individual and community level. We have therefore developed 'Our Energy', a custom mobile application (app) to 'experience' what it would be like to have direct access to electricity from solar PV in a community setting. It is designed to facilitate demand side response for users to compare their household energy consumption and associated self-consumption from. This study uses a community based social marketing approach to support the app design, development, evaluation and deployment for a specific user group from a small Swiss city. This paper includes the results from a pilot study where the beta version of the app was tested during two weeks in March 2019 with 32 participants. The feedback helped improve the demand side response strategy along with the real-time statistics for participants to monitor self-consumption and electricity savings potential from Solar PV.