Northern Powergrid has trialled a mobile gaming app that offers players cash prizes for reducing their electricity consumption.
The company said the project shows how mobile gaming could become an important tool for network operators as they seek to manage growing demand at the lowest cost to consumers.
“Household electricity use will grow significantly as electric vehicles and heat pumps become mainstream, increasing demand on the network,” said Northern Powergrid innovation project Andrew Webster.
“Mobile games offer a fun solution to help manage this demand, rewarding our customers for reducing their consumption at peak periods.”
Northern Powergrid teamed up with Newcastle University and gamification company GenGame to develop the app.
When demand on the local network is high, players receive an alert that ‘GenGame’ is active. The more they reduce their consumption, the more points they earn, increasing their chances of winning £350 of cash prizes each month.
Players were recruited via Facebook from across Northern Powergrid’s customer base. They downloaded the free app and were sent self-install equipment, which enabled them to monitor their demand in real-time on their mobile phone.
More than 2,000 people took part in the three-year project. They reduced their consumption by an average of 305 watts – or 11 per cent – during games, with some players slashing their usage by as much 4.9kW in short bursts.
GenGame chief executive Stephane Lee-Favier said: “Pausing your washing machine is only worth around 10p, which isn’t going to change customers’ behaviour. However, if you aggregate lots of small actions into one pot and create a £100 monthly prize it becomes much more interesting.”
He said one of the challenges they faced in designing the app was how to keep customers engaged when there were only two or three games each week. “DSR happens infrequently, and you don’t do anything most of time. It’s a waiting game.”
Their solution was to create a sister game called ‘GenBlast’ which people could play at any time to win “power-up points”. These points could then be used to boost their performance during the main games, and therefore raise their chances of winning a prize.
Webster explained how the app might be used in future: “If we see an increase in electric vehicles in one area we could just run a GenGame and reward people for charging their car when there is spare capacity on the network. As long as the incentive costs less than upgrading the local network, we have a winner.
He continued: “This is a much more dynamic approach for a more dynamic world. It creates a personal connection which we could also explore for other purposes such as fault reporting and energy saving advice.”
The lessons from the trial will inform a follow-up scheme named ‘GenDrive’ which will attempt to use mobile games to incentivise drivers of electric cars to use their vehicles to support to the power grid.
Northern Powergrid, Newcastle University and GenGame will work alongside green energy supplier Ecotricity and market intelligence firm EnAppSys on the £400,000 project. It is being undertaken as part of a vehicle-to-grid charging competition funded by the Office for Low Emissions Vehicles and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.