WEnergy

Team: Houtan, Sebastian, Tim

Motivation

Electricity prices are at the rise. More and more house owners are putting solar panels on their roof to become independent from their electricity providers and from inflation of energy prices.

The 47M persons in Germany, who are living in appartment buildings, have no chance to produce their own electricity. They heavily depend on the commercial energy providers and they have no means to fight inflation.

This case study plays with the idea of a fictitious community “WEnergy” that offers sustainable crowdfunding energy projects to everyone. Through crowdfunding, the community can invest and realize larger and very efficient wind- or solar parks which a single person would not be able to realize.

After joining the community, a member can purchase shares of upcoming sustainable energy projects which the community will realize. As a return, the shareholders are supplied with the energy share from their projects they invested in. Shareholders can use their energy shares to cover their own energy demand or they can also sell it on the market.

Secondary Research

User Interviews and Survey

We did qualitative interviews with 5 persons and a quantitative survey with 24 respondents.

Main insights from interviews

• Interviewees are very much in favor of renewable energies. Some however think that the German government made lots of errors in the past.
• Economically better situated persons are not frightened but still disturbed about recent price increases. Not so good situated persons are really concerned.
• Most interviewees like the idea of becoming independent from electricity providers. Some persons would not spend effort into a private project because it is very time consuming.
• The biggest obstacle for people living in apartment buildings to not invest into personal solar or wind energy is not owning the place (roof).
• Interviewees would like to be able to make both one-time investments as well as monthly investments of smaller amounts (like a savings plan).
• Most interviewees understand that such an investment is a longer term investment which breaks even after 15–20 years.
• Most interviewees would like to use the energy share of their investment and would only sell the surplus energy on the market. They however request that the energy is available when they need it (consequence: requires energy storage / battery).
• Interviewees provided a comprehensive list of data / information they would require to take an investment decision. This data was taken into consideration for the definition of the project details screen.
• Additional insights: (1) all facilities need an energy storage at least to bridge the gap between day and night, ideally also to collect “energy” for the winter, where more electricity is needed. (2) One interviewee suggested to also contribute with space instead of money (e.g. a farmer offering a field for a wind or solar park and getting shares instead of money). (3) Network cost / taxes need to be considered as well

Quotes from user interviews

“I would love to produce my own energy but living in an apartment this is unfortunately not possible as I do not own the roof”.

“Energy prices are going up. My electricity bill doubled. But what can I do? I am bound to my provider”

“ I am unclear about which form of renewable energy makes sense. Is wind better than solar? What else is there? Overall, I think that we should add sustainable energy elements with every house. I am pretty disappointed about the development of solar. Why is this still a completely separate construction that have to be on the roof? Why is this not included in facades or in any other existing construction elements?”

“Politics did not care much during the past two decades and all of a sudden this topic is important because of the recent crisis, I built a house in 2003 and back then already had solar panels on the roof and it seems nothing much happened since then, Personally the topic is important for me but still I don’t care much about it because I cannot do much with my current housing situation living in an apartment building”

Main insights from survey

User Persona

Based on all the insights from the secondary research, the user interviews and the survey, we developed the persona of Max Green who is very concerned about global warming, wants to become independent from inflation on the electricity market and needs a trustful system when investing money into sustainable energy projects.

User Journey

Max gets money from Grandma and wants to make a sustainable investment but is not happy with the information provided throughout the whole process. Furthermore, Max did not find an offering that would supply them with the respective energy share. All models Max found were financial investment models.

Problem Statement

User Flow

Within this case study, we focused on the scenario where users evaluate upcoming projects and take an investment decision based on the data provided.

Not in scope of this case study

• Initial user onboarding flow
• Monitoring of ongoing projects especially the ones, a member invested in. For ongoing projects, the project details screen will have to be enriched with actual data and a comparison of plan with actual data.
• “About us” page, explaining all details about the community and how they work
• User handling and administration

Lo-Fi Wireframes

We created Lo-Fi Wireframes, discussed and voted for the different approaches and started to create Mid-Fi Wireframes.

Mid-Fi Wireframes & Test

We created and tested our Mid-Fi Prototype with the interviewees from the user interviews and received valuable feedback to improve the wireframes. Most feedback was around better explaining the business and creating trust in the model which we tried to realize in the Hi-Fi prototype.

Two of the interviewees who saw the prototype, asked when the actual product would be available to start their investment.

Moodboard / Color Branding

We tested our mood board and the results show that it expresses our main attributes “sustainable”, “natural” and “social”.

Hi-Fi Mockups

You can test the final prototype here.

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