Consumerism and Energy Conservation

I had quite a surprise this morning. Actually it was more like an epiphany, really.

For over fifteen years I have struggled with energy conservation in the electric utility industry. I’m a trained energy auditor and was a certified Home Energy Rating System technician. I visited with electric customers to answer the question, “Why is my energy bill so damned high and what can I do about it?”

I did detailed inventories and spit out detailed reports showing the source of the culprits contributing to high energy bills. I offered suggestions for how these customers could save money. Most of the time, I got a polite thank you. Sometimes I got a reference to another customer wanting to know, “Why is my energy bill so damned high and what can I do about it?” But, only a few cases out of hundreds brought any action on the customer’s part. One customer really loves me. He saved over three hundred dollars on propane the first month after he actually performed the measures I recommended, but, that was the exception.

Generally, customers just kept on doing what they had done before, yelling at family members to “turn off those lights” and “close the damned door – what were you – born in a barn”, and; they kept sending their money to the utility companies.

My epiphany was the result of reading a recent report by a group called ECOALIGN. Their mission is to” .. align corporate and consumer behavior with the future of energy and environment via innovative marketing and communications strategies”.

The report titled Project Energy Code, told me exactly why I couldn’t get any traction with most customers to implement the energy conservation measures I recommended. Maybe this explains why you haven’t taken action either.

The “problem” is a combination of three issues, visibility, ambivalence, and trust, as explained in the report prepared by Pippa Chenevix Trench. Here is my take on what they are getting at.

Visibility- Many of us won’t implement energy saving actions because even if we do, no one will know. Appraisers won’t increase the home’s value. Neighbors won’t make encouraging comments and no one will really be able to tell that we’re going green and saving the planet. It’s hard to brag about something you didn’t use –like energy.

Ambivalence- My dictionary defines Ambivalence as the “existence of mutually conflicting feelings or thoughts such as love or hate about some person (maybe energy auditors), object (like set back thermostats) or idea (like energy conservation). Some people might be thinking, “what’s the use, the planets going down the tubes anyway, why bother”. Or maybe they’re faced with the conflicting choice of paying for a great vacation versus installing more attic insulation. If you read the report you might conclude that the problem could even be deeper and more subtle than that. It could be anthropological.

Trust – This one really got me. Although I had a good working relationship with many customers, I was working for the utility. This fact alone made people wonder why I was recommending actions that would cut the profits from my employer. I talked about how we cared about energy conservation as well as the need to reduce the company’s cost to buy power. The report referenced a piece of research from Arizona that showed that when customers got energy saving ideas from a government agency, 17% of the recipients took energy saving actions. While 0% of recipients that got the same advice from a utility took any action. I guess I should be glad I got as many positive results as I did.

Yet, to save the planet, really save customers money and reduce the growing demand for electricity, we are all going to have to get a lot more successful at selling energy conservation.

I hope you will take the time to read the report yourself. It’s free. I didn’t even have to register or give away any personal information. Reading this report showed me that customer choices are complicated and go way beyond the typical environmentalist accusations that we are all just thoughtless consumers. EcoAlign concludes that our “consumption [is] not out of mindless greed but in response to a complex web of culture and belonging” influences. Wow, if I’d only known.

The Project Energy Code concludes with the call to arms for more research into human behavior as it applies to energy conservation. They say, “there are three areas for future research that stems from the hypotheses described in this essay”:

1. Understanding better how energy consumption and environmental issues are “bundled” within the broader context of people’s day to day lives.

2. Understanding the ways in which information surrounding energy use and decisions over consumer practices flows within and between households and social networks.

3. Identifying ways in which energy efficient behavior can be made more visible and the impacts of different media in communicating this information.

I’ll be thinking a lot about this report and its importance to saving money and the planet at the same time. In the mean time, I hope someone gets working on those three additional areas of research. If the experts are right, energy conservation is still the best bang for the buck and “negawatts” are still worth bragging about to your neighbors.

© 2008 Mark R. Daily