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Under the Energy Efficiency Directive (2012/27/EU) energy companies have to achieve yearly energy savings up to 1.5% of annual sales to final consumers. Although buildings’ occupants and energy end-users seem to be gaining greater awareness of the value and need for sustainable energy practices, they do not behave in a more energy-conscious way. Existing solutions tend to be complicated, excluding buildings’ occupants from the process of understanding how the building works in terms of energy efficiency. This study presents a suite of user-centered applications, which will empower energy end-users to engage in achieving energy efficiency, using an open, secure, privacy-respectful, configurable, scalable cloud based big data infrastructure. This multi-disciplinary big data environment will integrate heterogeneous types of data, combined with emerging machine learning algorithms, distributed ledgers, blockchain technologies and a digital reward scheme through an alternative currency. These tools provide a “user – centric” framework for energy companies, local and regional authorities and third parties to empower energy end-users to take an active attitude in their energy usage. The proposed framework aims at transforming the social environment in a building to make people aware of the value of energy, and the importance of their collaboration, unlocking a potential for 12TWh energy saved in Europe.

Calls “to do science differently” and democratise the research process have proliferated in the last decades, especially in the context of climate science and policy support. This new arena demands more participatory procedures to expand the knowledge-making beyond researchers and experts. One way that science has started to interact with society has been the increasing number of online platforms that have emerged as alternative forums, providing the opportunity for engaging a variety of tools, models, results, and preferences. This study presents I2AM PARIS, a platform dedicated to delivering on comprehensive and comprehensible scientific information in support of climate policymaking. It does so by bringing the climate-economy modelling community together in a common workspace, with shared protocols, data exchange formats, and nomenclature, and by making the used and produced information accessible to and digestible by all stakeholders. To this end stakeholders, who lie at the heart of the platform, have co-designed the presentation of the platform in order to respond to pertinent questions in the climate debate co-created with stakeholders and the scientific processes together. Oriented on documenting detailed capabilities of integrated assessment models, providing access to input datasets and assumptions driving them, and offering ad hoc visualisation and databases of their outputs, I2AM PARIS emphasises transparency, reproducibility, inclusivity, plurality, and comprehensibility.