Here’s one of my all-time favorite internet toys: a web-based dashboard that shows how much power, water, and heat my office building uses. It updates itself continually, in real time, for each floor of the building—so I can see (or at least, I think I can) the power draw when the office fridge goes on, or when I turn out the office lights.
I started playing with the dashboard in mid-September—and I think that it’s taught me more about myself than about the building’s energy use.
- I’m competitive. The electricity dashboard lets me compare consumption floor-by-floor in the building. And for some reason, I’ve paid a lot of attention how well my floor does vs. the other floors in the building. I especially pay attention to my arch-nemeses on the 7th floor, who continually use less electricity per employee than my floor (the 5th). If it weren’t for them, we’d be in first place! GRRR! After a week of losses, I got peeved enough at our daily, ignominious second-place finish that I went upstairs to Floor 7 to figure out what was going on. It turns out that one office has a bunch of remote workers—for the purposes of the office count they’re listed as “employees” but are rarely in the office. Cheaters! You know who the real winners are. Floor 5 rules!!! Boo-yah.
- I’m easily distracted. When the dashboard was a bright shiny new toy, I played with it a lot. I visited it several times a day—and, more constructively, I paid attention to it, doing much more than I usually do to curb my office’s electricity consumption. (I didn’t want lose to our real arch-rivals, the non-cheating 13th floor. Floor 5 rules!!!) But within a couple of weeks the novelty started wearing off. My visits slacked off to maybe once every few days, then once a week. The utility dashboard hasn’t completely fallen off my radar screen, but I’m now much less cognizant of it than I used to be—and as a result, much less attentive about my energy use.
- I like to be in control. At first, I felt like the dashboard gave me an opportunity to exercise control over the office’s energy consumption. I’d turn off the office lights, and think that I saw the whole floor’s performance improve on the dashboard. But pretty quickly I realized that almost anything I did was a drop in the bucket: I’d turn off my computer to save power when I stepped out of the office, only to come back to find that the 13th floor had opened up big a lead on us. You see, most of the big power drains on our floor—phone systems, servers, fridges, you name it—are outside my personal control. And apparently, when I found that I couldn’t control the squiggles and graphs on the energy dashboard, I lost some of my fervor for conservation.
I have no idea if other people are like me: I could be the only irrationally competitive, distraction-prone control freak out there. But if I’m not, there may be some broader lessons here: if you want to give people energy information that they’re actually going to act on…
- First, tap into people’s competitive instincts, by showing how their performance stacks up with their neighbors;
- Second, make sure that that the information is presented on something that people see regularly (say, a utility bill), not something that they have to make a special effort to find; and
- Third, make sure that the person who’s receiving the information has fairly direct control over what’s being measured.
Hey, wait, that sounds a lot like the OPOWER electric power billing service that Seattle is currently testing. OPOWER’s billing system puts information about neighbors’ energy consumption right on utility bills themselves—and rewards energy-thrifty homes with a smiley face on the bill. We’ll have to wait and see how things pan out in Seattle. But if we’re like other cities, the reward of a smiley face—and the taste of sweet, sweet victory over one’s neighbors—is enough to motivate some significant shifts in household energy consumption.
Andrew
Hi Clark, thanks for the post, and insight into how you and others in the Vance Building are using your Building Dashboard. I think you’re right that in commercial spaces especially it can be disempowering to find out that you don’t have control over a large portion of the energy use. Having said that, we are finding plug loads account for 20-50% of an office’s electricity, and within that, there are lots of behaviors and management changes that can have a significant impact. It’s important to understand what the biggest users in an office are, and empower people to make management changes to the larger items (shared office equipment, kitchen facilities etc) if they are so inclined. As you’ve continued to use the Building Dashboard over time, are the features on it that you think would continue to hold your interest? Alternatively, are there websites that you go to for regular updates of information (Facebook etc)? The staff at Lucid (myself included) would be excited to work with you further to find ways to engage occupants and conserve energy in your office. Cheers, Andrew deCoriolis Lucid Design Group
Chuck Eberdt
Nice column – I enjoyed reading it and I think you hit on some key questions. O Power and other programs seem to indicate that we can play on some people’s competitiveness to harvest energy savings, but I think you cued up a couple of the important variables – making sure that the information is easy to “find” and act on intelligently. Most of the feedback devices I have heard of don’t do much more than tell you you are using too much, so there is room for some real improvement there. Yet, I think you danced around a little bit on another important issue – what’s the persistence of the effort? Looks like even someone as competitive, motivated, and informed as yourself loses interest and in comparatively quick time. If the hardware, software, and time involved turns out to be expensive, but the savings are only appreciable for a few weeks, maybe there is more smoke and mirrors to some of this stuff than folks would have us believe. No offense but how dweebish do we expect the public to become in order for this to work? Because you and I are more dweebish than most – as evidenced by your activity and my response – but I doubt most people are going to go to these lengths.