Green with Envy: Neighbor Comparisons and Social Norms in Five Home Energy Report Programs

Social norms, which describe commonly accepted ways of behaving, have long been recognized as a powerful way to influence behavior. People’s beliefs about what they think everyone else is doing can be leveraged to increase the probability that an individual will perform a desirable behavior such as reducing his or her energy use (Schultz et al 2007). This paper explores one way in which program administrators are using social norms to spur neighborly competition and, as a result, curb energy use. In recent years, home energy reports (HER) programs have applied the concept of social norms to the energy efficiency context. These feedback programs inform customers of how their energy consumption compares to their neighbors’ and provide other information about their usage, with the goal of enticing customers to change their energy use behavior to improve their relative neighborhood ranking. This paper provides an overview of several HER programs that have been evaluated to date. It also describes a number of the characteristics that varied across these programs and the ways in which these variables impacted, or did not appear to impact, the energy savings generated by the program. The case studies include home energy report programs delivered by five different program administrators: ComEd in Illinois, National Grid in Massachusetts, Puget Sound Energy in Washington State, Sacramento Municipal Utility District in California, and Southern California Edison. In particular, this paper looks at the possible relationship between key variables, such as baseline energy use and the frequency with which the home energy reports were sent, and the overall reported savings from these programs. This paper also explores the correlation between participant characteristics such as baseline energy use and the apparent effectiveness of HER programs for these customers.