The purpose of SOCIALENERGY is the easy, rich and deep communication among the energy sector stakeholders and residential energy consumers that will allow them to: i)discover each other and their needs,ii) educate themselves towards a better understanding of the difficulties and the challenges that each one faces and iii) finally, interact and trade with each other especially in the form of DR energy programs. All these will lead to a more energy efficient and finally free from energy dependencies, environmentally friendly society.

In more detail, SOCIALENERGY will:

1. Apply and evolve recent incentive technologies (localized social externalities) towards effective use of behavioral economics in DR and energy efficiency sector.
2. Develop ―SOCIALENERGY virtual world‖ by transferring gaming technologies into the energy efficiency sector, so as to educate and incentivize utility customers organized in ECs towards understanding and adopting modern DR programs.
3. Develop ―SOCIALENERGY real world‖ by engaging the users via advanced gamification techniques towards self-organization and management of ECs and efficient interaction with SOCIALENERGY‘s commercial activities.
4. Provide a single point of hosting and advertisement services to energy consumers, energy communities, utilities and companies related to energy efficiency products and services via the development of context-aware recommendation algorithms.
5. Perform small scale and diverse experiments that involve: i) real users, ii) utilities, iii) companies active in energy efficiency products and services in order to: a) validate the concept of SOCIALENERGY, b) evolve its technologies, c) trigger its adoption from these markets.
6. Offer Energy Information Distribution as a Service (EIDaaS) to multiple stakeholders and commercialize information related with energy efficiency.

 The general idea of the proposed below:

For the evaluation and empirical evolvement of the proposed platform, SOCIALENERGY will perform experiments with real and motivated communities by exploiting real users from:
 

• Users (energy consumers) from INTELEN‘s portfolio
• Users of utilities associated with INTELEN and the project. An indicative list of seven (7) utilities from seven (7) different EU countries is available.
   The vast pool of online social network users (e.g. Facebook) through the advanced interaction with them that SOCIALENERGY will develop.
• Users of energy efficiency companies and stakeholders with which SOCIALENERGY will communicate during its execution. The project‘s initial list includes a total of three (3) large companies.

Finally, SOCIALENERGY consortium has been chosen deliberately in order to dispose: i) motivated users and many relevant communities, ii) experts from the ICT, energy efficiency, gaming and education sectors with mature implementations and deep background in the aforementioned technologies, iii) an already existing commercial energy efficiency platform.