The project is beginning to take shape with the design and development of a web app that will allow citizens to be informed and advised on procedures and procedures related to energy consumption in the home.
After a co-creation process between the project’s partner entities, Associació Benestar i Desenvolupament – Grup ABD , Associació Ecoserveis and BitGenoma , in which the coordinators of the Barcelona Energy Advice Points also participated, some of the functionalities that the application will include have begun to be defined.
At the moment, work is being done on the user side, to define what needs the application must cover in order to provide a service both to people who are served by the PAE and, in the future, to any citizen who wants to adjust and control their electricity, water or gas consumption. The application will improve communication between PAE professionals and users, offer more specific and updated information on the status of procedures and allow people who use the application to manage their energy more autonomously.
“The person will be able to fill out questionnaires, provide their details and even make an appointment without having to contact the services through the usual channels, which are email or the helpline”, explains Sofia Recio, technical and energy rights coordinator of the PAE. “We are on the way to opening another gateway to this service, simplifying all the bureaucracy of the procedures and procedures that involve professionals to give more space to quality care and attention to the people who contact the service”, she adds.
The challenge of replication
Once the application has been designed using the city of Barcelona as the first pilot test, one of the challenges is to see how it could be replicated in another city.
The replication of the product in other municipalities “has a reason to be based on a need”, points out the technical leader of La Meva Energia by ABD, Marc Tejedor; which is the lack of centralization of energy advisory services in the Catalan territory. “[These services] They exist, they depend on each municipality and each municipality offers them in the way it considers and using the tools it considers”, he adds. “At the local level we are working towards the same objective”, he explains, but with the web app we want to try to save this diversity in management “by promoting a tool that is useful and that can be applied to other municipalities”. This is a complicated challenge, as BitGenoma developer, Michelle Lema, acknowledges. “We will provide an open tool, but it will be the responsibility of each city council to implement this system and adapt the application to its needs”.
Although the development of the application is at a very early stage, the team has already maintained contact with other entities and existing projects and the assessment has been positive. “It has generated interest in the web app,” says Tejedor.
“In Catalonia, energy poverty is increasingly high”, points out Sofia Recio. With this app and the use of open source to create it, the aim is also to “encourage the administrations to see the need to have a similar service as in Barcelona, Santa Coloma… See the importance of this service and make it extensive at the citizen level”, she adds. Thus, the incorporation of this web app would allow for more fluid communication between professionals and users, facilitate attention from professionals and greater transparency in relation to procedures and procedures for citizens.
Logo of the My Energy app
“La Meva Energia” project is funded by the European Next Generation Fund and the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan of the Government of Spain.
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