Who’s Saving Electricity in Your Neighborhood?
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Software company Opower thinks it can get consumers to use less electricity by instigating some friendly neighborhood competition.
It was late afternoon at Opower headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, but the energy start-up’s hive mind was thrumming steadily.
“Let’s take a walk,” said Marc Laitin, senior director of consumer marketing. “I think best when I’m moving.”
Laitin is a typical Opower manager — Harvard educated, safely under 40, animated like a street theater puppet, and dressed like he was going to a Decemberists’ concert. He set off down the hall on a talking jag, punctuating his ideas with wild arms. He wanted to make an idea about turning down the heat in winter go viral. People forward funny emails all the time, he posited. Could his idea work by word of mouth?
We came to a bare conference room — its floor still raw concrete — that looked out over the Potomac. “How do we get people talking about conserving energy?” Laitin wondered aloud. “How do we generate hype?”
He began to build a meme. Winter meant the holidays, and the holidays meant ugly sweaters. What if Opower sent every homeowner an ugly sweater? Too expensive, and Midwesterners might not get the joke. What if the company instead sent tiny ugly sweaters, designed to be worn by the home’s thermostat? Tiny things are cute, and cheap. If done right, it would make the neighborhood chatter mill go bonkers.
Opower- an information software company founded in 2007 as Positive Energy — is a young group of computer engineers, social scientists, and Silicon Valley vets. Thanks to an infusion of $50 million in venture capital in late 2010, the company was in the midst of a massive build-out during my visit last summer, doubling its team with 100 new employees. Around the office, yoga balls and standing desks took the place of cubicles. A glassy kitchen was stocked with Odwalla juices, craft beers, and an espresso maker. A running ticker on the wall showed kilowatt-hours saved nationwide — 300 million and climbing. Everywhere, the intensity hovered between hungry and frenetic, all trying to solve a single problem: How do you convince homeowners to use less electricity?
The answer proves to be remarkably old-school.
Getting people to use less electricity is a quandary that has plagued utilities and environmentalists alike for decades, and previous attempts to crack it have resulted in some costly failures. The Age of Smart Meters, which provide up-to-the-minute data on energy use, has brought little revolution; the technology is expensive and — let’s be honest — you don’t have the free time to log on to your utility’s website and parse graphs detailing of your monthly kilowatt-hours. Psychologists have long understood that humans are miserable at opting in, which is why gee-whiz iPad apps showing every circuit in your house have been slow to gain traction. Utilities running small pilot programs for in-home monitors — which provide real-time feedback on energy use and retail for around $120 — have found that use of the device can lead to significant reductions, but only in some homes. And persistence is fragile, too; the novelty of the gadget wears off or the batteries run out, and replacing them is a hassle. In one study, nearly one-third of the participants never bothered to set up their monitors. In another, 35 percent said they planned to discontinue use after the trial.