Offering people better data and some coaching about their home energy use can lead to substantial reductions in consumption and costs, according to a study undertaken in Amsterdam.
The experiment, conducted by a team of researchers from the Netherlands and the United States, is said to have resulted in households cutting their energy expenses in half, on average – saving sufficient to lift more then three quarters of them out of fuel poverty.
Conducted by a team drawn from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Senseable City Lab, and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the researched recently published their findings in the journal, Nature Scientific Reports.
Joseph Llewellyn, a researcher with Senseable City Lab, who is also a researcher at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS), and the KTH Royal Institute, was one of the co-authors of the study.
“Our energy coaching project as a whole showed a 75% success rate at alleviating energy poverty, ” he said.
Fábio Duarte, fellow-co-author, and associate director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, added: “Energy poverty afflicts families all over the world. With empirical evidence on which policies work, governments could focus their efforts more effectively.”
The researchers developed the study after engaging with city officials in Amsterdam. In the Netherlands, about 550,000 households, or 7% of the population, are considered to be in fuel poverty; in the European Union, that figure is about 50 million. In the US, separate research has shown that about three in 10 households report trouble paying energy bills.
To conduct the experiment, the researchers ran two versions of an energy coaching intervention. In one version, 67 households received one report on their energy usage, along with coaching about how to increase energy efficiency. In the other version, 50 households received those things as well as a smart device giving them real-time updates on their energy consumption.
All households also received some modest energy-savings improvements at the outset, such as additional insulation.
Across the two groups, homes typically reduced monthly consumption of electricity by 33% and gas by 42%. They lowered their bills by 53% percent, on aggregate, and the percentage of income they spent on energy dropped from 10.1% to 5.3%.
According to the study findings, some of the biggest behavioural changes included things such as only heating rooms that were in use and unplugging devices not being used. Both of those changes save energy, but their benefits were not always understood by residents before they received energy coaching.
Llewellyn added: “The range of energy literacy was quite wide from one home to the next. And when I went somewhere as an energy coach, it was never to moralize about energy use. I never said, ‘Oh, you’re using way too much.’ It was always working on it with the households, depending on what people need for their homes.”
Technology nudge
Intriguingly, the homes receiving the small devices that displayed real-time energy data only tended to use them for three or four weeks following a coaching visit. After that, people seemed to lose interest in very frequent monitoring of their energy use. And yet, a few weeks of consulting the devices tended to be long enough to get people to change their habits in a lasting way.
Report co-author Titus Venverloo, a research fellow at the MIT Senseable City Lab, and Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, said: “Our research shows that smart devices need to be accompanied by a close understanding of what drives families to change their behaviours.”
The researchers acknowledge that working with consumers to reduce their energy consumption is just one way to help people escape energy poverty. Other “structural” factors that can help include lower energy prices and more energy-efficient buildings.
On the latter note, the current paper has given rise to a new experiment Llewellyn is developing with Amsterdam officials, to examine the benefits of retrofitting residential buildings to lower energy costs. In that case, local policymakers are trying to work out how to fund the retrofitting in such a way that landlords do not simply pass those costs on to tenants.
“We don’t want a household to save money on their energy bills if it also means the rent increases, because then we’ve just displaced expenses from one item to another,” Llewellyn added.
Image credit: Zvone/Shutterstock
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