What Google and Stanford can teach Asia about electricity management

Smart meters that show consumers’ energy consumption won’t be enough to reduce use, studies show.

Prof. James Sweeney, Director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center discussed how the U.S. practices energy efficiency during one of the roundtables of the Singapore International Energy Week held at Suntec Singapore.

According to Sweeney, one example of an initiative take towards energy efficiency in the U.S. is Google and in Stanford’s collaboration on an experiment using Google PowerMeter. Results show that they were able to reduce energy use by 4% in the first month. However, at the end of 4 months, data showed a decline in the energy conservation of the control group, as compared to the experimental group. Sweeney says that the problem is that efforts towards energy conservation disappear after some time because people tend to go back to their normal habits and forget about it.

One reason consumers may not really care about energy conversation is that power doesn’t account for much of their paypacket, at least in the U.S., and having to remember to turn off the lights isn’t worth the time.

He said that in the US, retail energy costs account for around 2.2 % of a household’s disposable income, so people are not so motivated to choose and make energy usage decisions based on efficiency. “If you look you shouldn’t expect to have optimizations. So what are the ways to deal with this? It’s not a single issue, if you think about a systematic overuse of energy in comparison to economic efficiency, it’s not one problem, it’s an array of different problems, so there is not one solution. We have a price on carbon so that should be part of the solution, but pricing is not going to be the whole answer, if you have information problems and a set of cognitive problems,” he said.

Sweeney also discussed other ways of promoting energy efficiency in the U.S. “One way is to make information more available, like in California, where information is provided on the energy efficiency ratings of commercial buildings, he said. “Information systems are also made available, like new genres of enterprise wide energy and carbon accounting and management software. Some examples include software like C3 and Hara that provide information on energy management and carbon savings.”

He adds that there are also incentives given to encourage people to conserve electricity. “The US navy is also experimenting with the pricing system for homes of navy personnel and there is a limit for the electricity that you could use. One motivation is that there are incentives given if the electricity consumed is less than the limit given,” he said.