  Commercial buildings account for approximately 35% of total US electricity
consumption, of which nearly two-thirds is met by fossil fuels resulting in an
adverse impact on the environment. This adverse impact can be mitigated by
lowering energy consumption via control of occupant plugload usage in a
closed-loop building environment. In this work, we conducted multiple
experiments to analyze changes in occupant plugload energy consumption due to
incentives and/or visual feedback. The incentives entailed daily monetary
values between $5 and $50 administered in a randomized order and the visual
feedback consisted of a web-based dashboard aimed at increasing the energy
awareness of participants. Experiments were performed in government office and
university buildings at NASA Ames Research Park located in Moffett Field, CA.
Autoregressive models were constructed to predict expected plugload savings in
the presence of exogenous variables. Analysis of the data revealed modulation
of plugload energy consumption can be achieved via visual feedback and
incentive mechanisms suggesting that occupant-in-the-loop control architectures
may be effective in the commercial building environment. Our findings indicate
that the mean energy reduction due to visual feedback in office and university
environments were ~9.52% and ~21.61%, respectively. By augmenting the visual
feedback in the university environment with a monetary incentive, the mean
energy reduction was found to be ~24.22%
