By Bart King
Internet giant Google this week introduced a prototype web application that displays real-time data about a home’s energy use. In theory, if you have a smart meter on your house or business, PowerMeter can track how much electricity your appliances use—and at what cost—for display on your homepage, right beside your weather forecast or stock quotes.
Research shows that providing consumers with detailed information about their electricity usage triggers a reduction in electricity demand. But I don’t think the do-gooders at Google have gone far enough. I don’t just want to know how much electricity I’m using; I want to see how much my neighbors are using, too—and let’s throw in water and gas while we’re at it.
Sure, there are privacy issues involved—so we’ll probably have to let people opt in. But the idea is to get a little friendly competition going.
An interesting report published last fall by an Oxford cultural anthropologist asserted that greater visibility of community habits is a key to persuading individuals to adopt less energy intensive lifestyles. The author, Dr. P. Chenevix Trench, suggests this approach is more effective than environmental education campaigns, which she claims are creating a backlash and actually driving people away with “green guilt.”
Instead of trying to create “socially motivated consumers,” she suggests focusing on making environmental needs part of the culture of consumption that defines community and identity. It’s heady stuff, more suited for a psychology textbook than a TV commercial, but I agree that a more subtle approach may be needed to reach independent-minded, freedom-loving Americans.
One of the toughest parts of building a social movement around energy efficiency, is that it can’t be seen. We don’t know what kind of light bulbs our neighbors use or where they set their thermostats at night. Conversely, Toyota’s Prius hybrid has been a huge success because it is such a visible symbol of eco-friendliness. So, if my neighbor could view his energy usage next to mine and everyone else’s on the street, maybe he wouldn’t run his air conditioner all through the workday when no one is home. (His compressor is about 15 yards from my office window.)
The Sacramento Municipal Utility District, affectionately known as SMUD, is actually testing this idea right now. It randomly selected 35,000 customers to receive monthly home electricity reports with bar graphs comparing their energy use with a neighborhood average. Halfway through the year-long program administrators said they have far exceeded the 2 to 3 percent reductions they expected.
However it’s only fair to note that administrators reported negative comments from a couple dozen participants, at least one of whom specifically used the word “guilt.” But this could be due to SMUD’s decision to assign happy faces and sad faces for below or above average consumption.
The smiley faces aren’t exactly subtle, but there is undoubtedly real potential here for taking efficiency to the grass roots level. It’s one thing to hear a public service announcement about insulating your attic and quite another to see that your neighbor is paying half as much as you are to the utility company each month. I wouldn’t hesitate to knock on the door of someone who is spending a fraction of what I do, because he or she obviously knows something I don’t. And I promise I won’t harass the woman down the street, even if she fires up her oven at noon in the middle of August. This is America after all.
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Bart King is News Editor of SustainableBusiness.com. This column is available for syndication.
Contact bart@sustainablebusiness.com.
Editor’s Note: Dr. Pippa Chenevix Trench’s report “Visibility, Ambivalence and Trust: Cultural Stumbling Blocks To Greater Household Energy Efficiency” can be downloaded at the EcoAlign website.
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