The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) recently published a report on pilot projects and experiments concerning real-time feedback. One of the major barriers to changing consumer behaviour is lack of feedback about the impact that their energy-saving behaviour has on energy use.
Residential electricity savings from real-time feedback in the nine pilots reviewed here ranged from 0 to 19.5%, with average savings across the pilots of 3.8%. The largest savings came from the replacement of pre-existing prepayment meters in Northern Irish homes with new prepayment meters having a real-time display. The smallest savings were observed in two pilots, which found no aggregate effect of real-time feedback on overall electricity consumption. One of the most promising results is that a small percentage of households in several of the pilots had large savings of up to 25%. ACEEE called this group the cybernetically sensitive, because they seem to respond more readily to feedback. For more information and to download the report, visit the ACEEE website.
Energy in Demand - Sustainable Energy - Rod Janssen 