Industry Looking to Engage Consumers in Energy Management

Harnessing usage data is essential to home energy management solutions, but there’s a disconnect between utilities' data and homeowners looking to control energy costs, said panelists on Parks Associates’ Smart Energy Summit Thursday.

“The effort that goes between understanding of data and actually implementing that into regular patterns of behavior at lower consumption levels is where things break down,” said Colin Billings, CEO of smart lighting company Orro, “There’s a big difference between knowing and being able to do something about it,” he said.

That’s complicated by the transitional state of home energy systems, which are “in the process of becoming more connected,” Billings said. “They need to go from being analog to being more connected, and then they need another piece that helps them become intelligent.” That intelligence takes the form of “effortless efficiency” where systems save energy for consumers automatically “rather than asking an individual to make a multitude of decisions every day about energy reduction.”

A challenge is getting data into “immersive customer journeys that cause customers to actually act,” said Bob Champagne, vice president-customer experience at Smart Energy Water, a customer experience platform for energy, gas and water providers. Timing is key, he said. “It’s all about time, context, place and weaving it into the customer journey so that the information you give them is actionable within their lifestyle.”

Personalization is important for consumer engagement, said Dan Sullivan, CEO of home energy management platform company EIQhome. Sullivan cited Netflix’s ability to provide a level of service and customer experience based on consumer’s behavior. “There’s huge opportunity to do that in energy also,” he said, citing the proliferation of smart energy devices and the amount of data being generated from the home currently, with much more expected in the future.

Matching data from a home’s energy usage with data from other sources can help consumers become “engaged in their home energy,” Sullivan said. Data doesn’t do that on its own, but the insights and actions based on the data do, he said. “There’s a hierarchy of information" an energy management platform can provide the consumer that will prove "we have a valuable service for them,” he said.

Commercial and industrial customers have engaged in energy management because there’s enough economic benefit to do so, said Jay Lasseter, vice president-industry and growth, of smart metering company Landis+Gyr North America. On the residential side, people do want to save money, but “they don’t want to work that hard for it," he said. "Economics is not enough to get them to do that.” The key is to make it easy, Lasseter said: “No one wants to use software unless it’s really easy to use.” It’s challenging for the industry to get data to users in a way they can engage with it, he said.

On opportunities for monetization in home energy management, “if you can get really good at isolating the impact of a certain appliance in real time," or showing the energy impact of day-to-day customer activities, “you can make some pretty big impacts" in the "planning and reliability of the grid," said Smart Energy Water's Champagne. “It goes back to value, not only money,” he said: “There are segments of the population who want to make an impact on the climate agenda.” Reaching those customers “at the right time and place is critical,” he said.

The potential dollar value of energy savings “is not tipping the scale in favor of more effort on energy savings,” said Billings of Orro. “Really effective energy reduction is going to save between a couple of hundred to a thousand dollars a year for most households, and that’s not even a vacation,” Billings said, “so other things have to come into play as well.” Those include making energy conservation easy, connecting to themes around climate and responsibility as part of collective action, and monetary incentives, plus adoption of electric vehicles and changing utilization patterns for the grid, Billings said.

Landis+Gyr's Lasseter noted enterprises made a big push on environmental concerns, but there’s more to be done with consumers. Most utilities and their suppliers have sustainability initiatives, but there’s an environmental theme “that we don’t talk about enough” on the residential side, he said.

EIQhome’s Sullivan said people are motivated by climate, cost and comfort, but the priority order varies by person. “The macro trends are that people are going to be paying a lot more attention to the environment,” especially as prices continue to rise for fossil fuels and electricity, he said. That consumers want to save energy but don’t know how “presents a huge opportunity for us as a group to make it easy for folks.” EIQhome provides information in dollars vs. kilowatt hours to help consumers understand how usage translates to cost, he said. “You start talking dollars, and you apply those dollars to devices and to a time-of-use environment, it becomes a very, very powerful tool.”

Champagne referenced The Green Button initiative, a response to an Obama administration call to action to give utility customers easy and secure access to their energy usage, via smart meters, in a consumer-friendly format for electricity, natural gas and water usage. “Participation in energy reduction consumption, smart grid, is going to become part of compliance and building codes and potentially even directly to the end consumer,” he said. Incentives will probably take the form of tax benefits, he said. “There’s going to be more and more of that,” he said. He also noted, “The jurisdictional map of all of this in the United States is pretty scary, but the more we see leaders’ past successes, I think we’ll see that expand.”