Participants had one year to implement in their own houses strategies and measures to reduce their overall energy consumption – the greater the reduction the bigger their chance of winning the competition!

Winners were the ones having adopted the best strategy to reduce their households' energy consumption. The choice of the strategy was completely free, there were no obligations and could be as drastic as one wanted to reduce energetic consumption ........... and the energy bill!

Participants from the same country had to:

• Compete against each other to succeed in obtaining the highest reduction in CO2 emissions and come first at national level and gain the “Energy Saver of the Year” title and

• Compete also in team for the “Climate Cup” title at European level. There were ten first-round contenders (one from each participating country): Ireland, UK, Denmark, Latvia, Bulgaria, Spain, Italy, Malta, Greece and Germany The winner was the national team with the highest energy savings for heating and electricity

The “European Citizens Climate Cup” started in April 2011, until april 2012 together with the European Sustainable Energy Week. Interested individuals subscribed the competition by entering their coutnry's web site and follow the instructions available there.

Each national web site contains the application "interactive Energy Savings Account (ESA)", a software which have enabled competing households to monitor their energy consumption, by entering the data regarding their house and energy bill.

Participating households entered their consumption and cost data from meter readings and energy bills into the web-based software ESA which stores, processes, and evaluates consumption data, displaying trends of past and future consumption, costs and emissions. The ESA benchmarked energy savings and calculated the reductions in CO₂ emissions of the different national teams, monitoring the progress of the competition.

The ESA application still working simple to use and read and have not required either specific competencies or long time to insert the data .