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ACEEE Report Says Smart Meters Alone Won’t Curb Power Use The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy analyzed 57 residential sector feedback programs undertaken between 1974 and 2010 and concluded that smart meters would only help realize significant power savings if they were used in conjunction with other measures that “inform, engage, empower and motivate people.”
The best approaches, concluded ACEEE, were programs that included enhanced billing—which shows ratepayers how their use compares with other households; daily or weekly use feedback delivered via in-home energy displays; and real-time use data delivered via internet.
These feedback mechanisms can help power users reduce electricity consumption by between 4 and 12 percent. By ACEEE’s estimates, such efficiency improvements could represent a cumulative net savings to consumers of from $2 billion to over $35 billion over the next two decades.
Enhanced billing could be offered fairly easily in the short term and, according to ACEEE, utilities and policymakers should make such programs a priority. Medium-term goals should include real-time feedback programs.
Average electricity savings associated with Web services providing daily or weekly feedback were about 8 percent; real-time feedback about usage and rates produced an average savings of about 9 percent per participating household.
In Nevada, NV Energy is exploring Web-based feedback programs as well as in-home energy displays that show consumers hourly information on their electricity usage and its cost.
A test program indicated that such displays resulted in 10 percent savings for 40 percent of users, 5 percent savings for 30 percent, and for the remaining 30 percent they did not change behavior at all. The displays cost around $250, so the utility is evaluating how to get the devices into the households most likely to use them.
Those households that don’t change are a concern to some as utilities tout the savings that can be realized through smart-meter implementations. Hearings before the Nevada Public Utilities Commission included data showing that only a fifth of households with programmable thermostats use the technology to change their home temperatures when they’re away. Nearly 20 pricing studies conducted in the U.S. suggest that time-of-use rates failed to create sustained changes in consumer behaviors. Elsewhere it has been observed that European households have realized more substantial feedback-induced savings than have American households, suggesting additional cultural factors at work. |
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