Behavioral Responses to Real-Time Individual Energy Usage Information: Evidence from a Smart-Meter Experiment

Presented by Professor Magali Delmas, UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, Anderson School of Management

Monday, May 07, 2012
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
La Kretz Hall, Suite 300, Large conference room

Behavioral Responses to Real-Time Individual Energy Usage Information: Evidence from a Smart-Meter Experiment
Magali Delmas, William Kaiser

With Omar Asensio, Victor Chen, Miriam Fischlein, Robert Gilbert

Environmental damage is often an unseen byproduct of other activities. Disclosing environmental impact to consumers can allow them to better understand the costs of their actions, leading to improved environmental behavior. In this research we investigate how real-time energy consumption feedback can be used as an effective tool for energy conservation. We undertake an experiment in a large sample group of graduate student family apartments at the University of California Los Angeles where we implement real-time information displays and frame the energy consumption feedback in a way that optimizes the psychological motivation to reduce energy use. This research harnesses behavioral science to design optimal interventions for changing energy use behavior and contributes to the understanding of non-price motivators for behavioral change. In a world where electricity is a small component of household expenditure and price increases are politically difficult to implement, behavioral “nudges” are a necessary tool to induce energy conservation. The findings hold direct implications for achieving measurable energy savings from the 65 million smart meters to be installed in the United States by 2015.