Changing our energy habits for good

“The Human Element,” as Dow Chemical rightly notes in its global ad campaign, is the one element that’s critical to innovation. But it’s also one that can’t be neglected as we work to upgrade and smarten our electricity grid and resource management strategies.

Without taking into account how humans think and behave, the best-laid plans and technologies for saving energy and reducing consumption of resources won’t stand a chance.

Consumer behaviour and the smart grid, in fact, is one of the key research topics targeted for 2011 by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). While some recent surveys have shown that energy customers are interested in the potential of smart-grid technology, many people say they don’t yet know enough about it. Going forward, that’s a problem the smart-grid industry will have to address far better if it wants to avoid, for example, future repeats of today’s scattered public backlash against smart meters.

Energy companies working with EPRI on its Smart Grid Demonstration Initiative are worried about how their customers have responded so far. The industry, they say, needs to do more to convey the value of smart technologies to end-users, to address some of the misleading or conflicting information people might be hearing, and to spread the word that grid upgrades aren’t necessarily bad news for consumer lifestyles.

Exelon Corporation, whose family of energy companies includes Illinois’ ComEd and Pennsylvania’s PECO, is currently analysing data it gathered from a customer application project last summer. One of the things it’s trying to determine is if there are any ways to accurately identify which types of customers respond best to various home energy management technologies. The company expects to conduct another survey this spring and release its early findings shortly afterward.

Just last week, Entergy New Orleans engaged upon a similarly-minded pilot project with Sensus, a metering, monitoring and automation company. The two-year-long home area networking test aims to get better insights into how people behave by working with volunteers in four groups. One group will receive smart meters only, while others will get both a smart meter and an in-home energy consumption display. A third group will try out smart meters paired with programmable thermostats and incentives for reducing energy loads (for example, rebates for using less air conditioning during times of peak demand), and a final group will receive smart meters and access to a web-based portal showing near-real-time information on home energy use and costs.

“This pilot program will help us understand which program elements are the most useful to customers in lowering their energy bill,” said Keith McInerney, director of smart grid deployment for Entergy.

Previous pilots, such as IBM’s 2009  test with Consert in Fayetteville, North Carolina, have found that giving users ways to monitor and control their energy use can help reduce consumption by up to 40 per cent. The trick, though, will be making those improvements stick on a large and long-term scale; the IBM-Consert project, for example, lasted just six months and involved only 100 participants.

Another challenge will be to find ways to encourage people to reduce their energy consumption even as they continue to add more and more electronic gadgets to their households. The International Energy Agency in 2009 warned that electronic devices, even as they become increasingly energy efficient, could see a doubling of energy consumption by 2022. As of 2010, consumer electronics already accounted for the biggest chunk of domestic electricity usage, with an average of more than 26 devices per household.

Faced with these two trends — the drive for less energy consumption versus the demand for ever-more gadgets — smart-grid companies will have their work cut out for them over the next several years. Their only hope for success will be to find the best ways to engage and motivate energy-users to make permanent changes to their current habits … and we all know how hard changing habits can be.