How to really engage with customers on energy efficiency

Consumers can be persuaded to be more energy efficient, but it takes more than merely sticking an energy monitor on the wall, says Matthew Aylott. Try a little psychology.

How can the UK government rescue its ailing energy efficiency programme? In her keynote address at the Behave conference earlier this month – organised by the UK Energy Research Centre and Energy Saving Trust – energy undersecretary Baroness Verma suggested that what was needed was a campaign like the “five-a-day” rule, which has been so successful in raising awareness of healthy eating.

The idea is simple: encourage people to do five things each day that are energy efficient. Line dry rather than tumble dry. Use the eco setting on your dishwasher. Turn off radiators in unused rooms. Switch the lights off when you don’t need them. Only fill the kettle with as much water as you need.

She said that a third of people continue to heat rooms they do not use regularly, while a fifth of us leave heating on when we go out. By adopting a five-a-day routine we could cut energy bills by around £100 a year, she concluded.

Unfortunately, research tells us that people care less about saving energy than we previously thought. Home is a place for comfort, not efficiency, it was found.

The key message that came from the Behave conference was that we need to appeal more to people’s values of comfort, home and security, if we want to deliver real, meaningful behavioural change. We need to reconceptualise energy reduction as a social good, not just an economic good.

Yes, concerns about rising energy bills are a big driver for cutting energy use in the home, but the truth is that people are not always governed by economically rational behaviours.

Some leave their lights on for the cat; others leave microwaves on standby because they do not want to reset the clock every time they use it, and when the iPhone 6 was launched it was not the 50 per cent improved energy efficiency of the processor that made the headlines.

Remember those energy saving light bulbs that needed time to warm up before they reached a dim glow? In advance of the European Union ban on incandescent light bulbs, a flood of people stocked up on incandescent bulbs in order to avoid being condemned to living in dimly lit rooms.

Thankfully a new generation of energy efficient light bulbs has overcome this problem, but this common reaction points to a key issue. People put comfort before efficiency. And practitioners and policymakers alike need to be smarter about how they engage with the public.

There were plenty of ideas at the conference on how to better engage people with energy efficiency, from showing smart meter displays with faces instead of numeric displays, to giving people thermal images of their homes. Apparently people receiving thermal images recalled heat loss information better than those who received just text.

Then there was some more novel research looking at the effect of converting energy use into sound so consumers could “hear” the energy they used, a technique that was showing promising initial results for lowering energy consumption. Other research demonstrated how simply changing the colour of lighting could give the psychological feeling of warmth and reduce demand for space heating.

There were also calls for better house design. Putting the living room on the upper floor and the bedroom on the ground floor was shown to save energy. While other research suggested secondary glazing and insulated shutters were more energy efficient than double glazing.

What do these approaches have in common? They demonstrate ways of enabling consumers to change behaviour and use less energy, without them having to make a conscious effort.

Research published by the UK Energy Research Centre in 2013, Value propositions for energy efficient renovation decisions, found that people do not like disruption to their lives. This might seem obvious, but it has important implications for the development of energy efficiency programmes.

The study used a series of consumer interviews and surveys to conclude that the best time to target homeowners is when they are undertaking other home renovations, when they are more open to the idea of making energy efficiency improvements.

The principle of automated external control of appliances – to balance grid load and reduce demand – was shown to be acceptable to around 75 per cent of people in a new study from a team at University College London. But one of the biggest issues remains trust, or the lack of it.

Trust in the big six is at an all-time low but smaller energy suppliers are faring far better. When it comes to trust, it seems the smaller you are the better. This raises the interesting question of why the UK government has put so much of the burden on rolling out energy efficiency measures on larger energy companies – companies with less than 250,000 customers are exempt from the Energy Company Obligation, for example.

Juliet Davenport, founder of Good Energy, took the opportunity in her keynote speech at the conference to say that what was needed was a certificate trading scheme for energy efficiency similar to the Renewables Obligation, whereby smaller suppliers – which she argued were in a better position to deliver energy efficiency than larger suppliers – could install energy efficiency measures, earn certificates and then sell them to those who had not met their obligations.

That is not to say that the big energy suppliers do not have a role in tackling energy inefficiency. Of course they do, but they are seen by many as being less personal, and the key to tackling energy inefficiency is to make it personal.