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Energy meters are coming out of the closet and being upgraded to “smart meters” as governments press us to think about how much power we’re using. The hope is this will provide easy carbon cuts by provoking us into cutting energy use. But a number of studies suggest it’s not going to be that simple.
By the end of the year a million smart meters will have been installed in UK homes, and hundreds of thousands of US homes already have them. It’s too early to draw many conclusions about their effect on power use, but a number of small studies suggest that the new infrastructure won’t have the desired effect unless it’s supported with the right psychological approach.
Not only are few people motivated to change their energy use, but using an energy meter can reveal just how small the payback for changing your behaviour can be.
Eric Paulos at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and colleagues report in a new paper how, as part of a study of domestic energy consumption, they gave 12 US households gadgets called Kill A Watts that reveal the energy use of devices.
Not one participant used the Kill A Watt and few showed interest in energy saving that would force a change in their behaviour. When they were told of the comparatively meagre potential savings the Kill A Watt might reveal – for example, that a computer consumes 25¢-worth of electricity per day – they became even less interested in turning off appliances.
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Despite such indifference and the tiny savings, however, many participants said they regularly switched off lights to save energy. But psychological experiments suggest that imagined peer pressure is the real reason for this behaviour: we turn out lights because we think everyone else does.
When a whole neighbourhood has smart meters, they can be used to apply such peer pressure. In 2007, P. Wesley Schultz at California State University in San Marcos and Robert Cialdini at Arizona State University in Tempe studied the influence on 290 households of what the neighbours think.
They monitored the power used by each household and then wrote each homeowner a note comparing their consumption with the neighbourhood average. A week later households with above-average power usage had reduced it significantly – but those with below-average usage had increased theirs, perhaps from fear of appearing too miserly. The researchers found that the low-energy users could be prevented from using more power simply by drawing a smiley face on the notes to indicate that conserving energy carries approval.
Schultz told New Scientist that such psychological tactics will be needed to make smart metering effective.
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Cialdini, a psychologist, is now chief scientist with Opower, a US firm making a business out of power consumption psychology. Working for utility firms, Opower sends reports to people detailing how their usage compares with similar homes in their area. It says 80 per cent of people receiving those reports take action to cut their consumption, compared with just 5 per cent if less personalised advice is given.
However, Opower reports that people cut their energy use by just 2 to 3 per cent on average, yielding annual savings of just tens of dollars. Participants in the Carnegie Mellon study said it would take savings 10 times greater to change their behaviour.
One alternative to the psychological approach is to design smart meters that take action for you. A device sold by UK firm Passivsystems can automatically make small changes to save power, for example adjusting a central heating thermostat in response to the temperature outdoors.
There’s a limit to how far that can go, though, before people feel out of control of their own home. Perhaps smart-meter pedlars will have to sharpen up their powers of persuasion for now, hoping that people will eventually get more excited about making small savings on power.
References: Paulos and colleagues will present their work at the Association for Computing Machinery 2010 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Atlanta, Georgia, this month; Schultz and Cialdini published their study in Psychological Science, vol 18, p 429
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