American Gas - August/September 2011 - (Page 34)

Peer Pressures a home owner shares her experience with her natural gas utility’s energy-use feedback reports. I would have thought my need for approgram, the utility partners with Opower, an energy efficiency software company. “Our partner takes a number of thirdparty databases and overlays that information on our customer accounts, to develop a more robust review of particular customers and their energy usage,” says Huso. For example, Opower uses publicly available information such as census data and property descriptions to identify Xcel customers having similar home sizes, usage patterns and demographic characteristics. Xcel, which has 400,000 natural gas customers in Minnesota, randomly selected 35,000 of those customers to receive detailed, printed reports on their energy consumption. To determine what effect, if any, the program has on energy usage, another 35,000 customers that exhibit similar demographic and usage characteristics were randomly selected as a control group. A similar process was used to select another 15,000 customers to receive electronic delivery of the reports. Editor’s Note: American Gas writer Sandy Sabo and her family recently participated in an energy efficiency reporting pilot program offered by their utility, Xcel Energy. Italicized portions of the article detail Sandy and her family’s personal experience with the program. proval—specifically, in the form of little smiley faces—would have disappeared when my elementary school years concluded. However, I found out differently when I began receiving bimonthly Home Energy Reports from Xcel Energy, which provides both natural gas and electricity to my home in Minnesota. The report provides a snapshot of my household’s energy usage compared with 100 nearby homes. If Xcel deems our usage in the “good” range, the report rewards me with one smiley face; a “great” rating earns two smiley faces. (Thankfully, the report does not print a frowny face when one’s household falls at the opposite end of the consumption spectrum; instead, it simply announces, “You used more than average.”) The customized reports are an integral part of Xcel’s Energy Feedback Pilot Program. “We wanted to determine whether providing customers with feedback on their own usage would help them use less energy on a monthly or even daily basis,” explains Nate Huso, product developer of Xcel’s pilot program. “The methodology we selected also enables customers to see how their energy consumption compares to their neighbors’.” After receiving approval from the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, Xcel launched the pilot program in December 2009 as part of its triennial conservation plan. To implement the 34 august/september 2011 AmericAn GAs Home Energy Report arrives in the mail in January 2010, I’m not surprised to see we ranked #70 out of 100 neighbors (with #1 considered the “most efficient neighbor”) for the preceding two months. After all, that was when we still had a rattling 23-yearold furnace—which, quite frankly, had been on life support for several years. We had recently re- When my first

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Gas - August/September 2011

American Gas - August/September 2011
Contents
President’s Message
In the Know
Industry News
Safety First
Is Now the Time for NGVs?
NGVs for America
The Drive to Succeed
Peer Pressures
Vendor News
Marketplace
Advertisers’ Index
Places to Be
Noteworthies
Jobline
Facts on Gas

American Gas - August/September 2011