Solar Industry Borrows a Page, and a Party, From Tupperware

By DIANE CARDWELL

New York Times

November 30, 2012

GOODYEAR, Ariz. — The neighbors had gathered on the patio of a sun-baked ranch here, eager to hear the party’s hosts talk about their products and how they could enhance their lives. But in place of the timeworn arrangement of plastic storage containers or cosmetics on the coffee table, the couple was showing off an array of a different sort: the 32 solar panels on the roof.

“It’s just wonderful, the savings that we’ve had on our bills,” Pat Peaper, one of the hosts, told the crowd as it sipped iced tea and lemonade and picked at cookies and crudités.

“We have a neighbor next door,” her husband, Jim, added, “who’s averaging $350 a month” in energy bills without solar. “If they put it in, they can certainly cut that, probably by two-thirds.”

Environmentalists, government officials and sales representatives have been trying to get Americans to go solar for decades, with limited success. Despite the long push, solar power still represents less than 1 percent of electricity generated in the United States. Home solar panel setups, which typically run $25,000 or more, are considered by many consumers to be the province of the rich or idealistic.

So now solar companies are adhering to a path blazed by Tupperware decades ago, figuring that the best sales people are often enthusiastic customers willing to share their experiences with friends and neighbors — and perhaps earn a referral fee on any sales that result.

In Arizona, a nonprofit marketing company called SmartPower has had surprising success building networks of neighbors who install solar in their homes and then spread the gospel at promotional gatherings like the Peapers’ party.

Solar companies, like SunWize Technologies and SolarCity, are running party-plan programs of their own, which makes it easier and cheaper for them to find new customers.

The effectiveness of such marketing is apparent in Pebble Creek, the gated community for older adults where the Peapers live. About 10 percent of the roughly 6,000 homes in the community, which is just west of Phoenix, have installed solar arrays, and more are about to sign up.

“You might or might not believe the salesperson,” said Ted Lindhorn, a guest at the Peapers’ September party who was considering a purchase. “But if it’s a friend or a neighbor that has nothing to gain for it, you’re going to believe them.”

In many cases, those friends and neighbors do have something to gain: they can earn bonuses for steering customers to installation companies. SolarCity offers $400 for each residential referral, while a local Arizona outfit called SolarParty.org advertises paying $250.

For SmartPower, which gets the bulk of its income from foundation grants and government and utility contracts, the parties are part of its effort to promote renewable energy and energy efficiency. After a pilot program in Connecticut, the group challenged 13 Arizona towns in 2011 to install solar on 5 percent of owner-occupied homes by 2015. A town reaching that goal gets a sign designating it an “Arizona Solar Community,” a reward meant to encourage both communal spirit and extramural competition.

The group, under the direction of its vice president, Toni Bouchard, created a Web site and hired solar coaches, local experts who can advise customers on which installation companies they can use and what kinds of rate plans would maximize their savings. The coaches also help recruit solar ambassadors like the Peapers: ordinary residents who have solar and are willing to organize parties to encourage their friends and neighbors to do so as well.

Almost half the towns have already exceeded the 5 percent solar goal, with Goodyear and three others passing 10 percent. SmartPower is now expanding its program in New England.

“On-the-ground outreach tied to the online communication is really what’s making the difference here,” said Brian F. Keane, president of SmartPower. “You need to meet people in the communities where they live, work and play.”

The party-plan model has traditionally been aimed at women, selling products for the home, bedroom and body, from Botox injections to Longaberger baskets. But the solar parties are intended to sell big-ticket items and appeal to men as well.

Just as Tupperware failed to fly off store shelves without a salesperson showing customers how to work the airtight seal, which inspired the party-plan model, solar panels often require demonstration and explanation to make the sale.

“If you can talk to someone who’s gone through it who has a positive view, then they could really alleviate some of the concerns,” said Bryan Bollinger, an assistant professor of marketing at the Stern School of Business at New York University who has studied patterns of solar adoption.

Mr. Bollinger found that people were more likely to install solar once their neighbors had. He said it was not clear what was behind that phenomenon, known as the peer effect, but it could be the combination of a conspicuous way of being green with the momentum of word-of-mouth.

That dynamic has been particularly strong in Pebble Creek, which has an active online network where residents offer referrals and advice.

“People here are real big on references,” said Joe Wallace, one of the Peapers’ guests, who said that he and his wife had thought about installing solar for a long time but decided to take the plunge only after learning more from their neighbors.

Dru Bacon, a former Solar Coach who lives in Pebble Creek and has been a driving force behind solar adoption there, said that while the promised savings on electricity had spurred many customers to install solar, that was not all that motivated them.

“I’ve had at least 10 people say, ‘I have the biggest solar system in the community,’ ” he said. “They don’t say, ‘I have the lowest electric bill.’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/business/energy-environment/solar-industry-borrows-a-page-and-a-party-from-tupperware.html?hpw

Save Kilowatts, Win a Prize

By DIANE CARDWELL

NY Times

July 24, 2012

With temperatures hovering near a sweaty 100 degrees in recent weeks, the nation’s electric utilities have been taking to Facebook and Twitter, urging customers to conserve energy in the hopes of avoiding blackouts and other strains on the system.

At Duke Energy, the country’s largest utility after its merger with Progress Energy, the effort has included something beyond the usual messages to turn down the air-conditioner. The company is promoting a series of Web videos featuring a fictitious girl named Shannon who appears with her family, the Powers, to dispense energy-saving advice.

“This summer, why not use a clothesline to dry your clothes instead of a dryer?” Shannon, also known as Bossy Pants, suggests while pinning up the family wash in a clip promoted recently on Youtility, Duke’s Facebook page for energy efficiency. “You’ll save a lot on your energy bill and your clothes will come out nice and fresh.”

The series, started last summer, is just one way that Duke and other electric companies across the country are trying to use social media, competitive games and Big Brotherish data analysis to push customers to buy less of the electricity they sell.

While it seems counterintuitive for utilities to discourage use of their product, it actually makes financial sense as they face government mandates to encourage more energy conservation and deal with the rising cost and difficulty of building power plants and distribution systems.

So in Chicago, a household that uses a lot of electricity might receive a mailing showing that more energy-efficient neighbors wash their clothes in cold water, along with a coupon for Tide Coldwater detergent. In Texas, customers can compete to be named the Biggest Energy Saver and get a shot at winning new appliances, home improvement gift cards or $5,000 to put toward a wind turbine. And outside Boston, customers earn points for saving energy that they can redeem for meals at local restaurants or a $10 discount at Whole Foods.

Motivating people to save energy isn’t really about the money, behavior experts say. Successful programs foster a sense of achievement and identity. And competing to beat your friends and neighbors at the savings game doesn’t hurt.

Many of these programs are still in their infancy, and it remains to be seen whether a significant number of customers want to work with their utility companies over energy savings; most customers become interested in their electricity only when it doesn’t work, executives and experts say. The Duke Youtility page, for instance, has fewer than 3,300 “likes,” and most of the recent comments complain about power failures, rate increases and the company’s troubled merger with Progress Energy.

But utilities hope to tap into the same dynamic that works for video games and applications like Foursquare, where users compete against one another to earn bragging rights, like becoming “mayor” of a favorite restaurant.

Opower, a leading home energy management company, has shown promising results with its keeping-up-with-the-Joneses approach, sending people reports on how their electricity use compares with households in their neighborhoods — complete with a smiley face, or two, depending on how they stack up. The company has created an app with Facebook and the Natural Resources Defense Council that can load a user’s energy data and allow people to compete with their friends and family.

Soon, said Daniel Yates, a co-founder of Opower, customers of the roughly 75 utilities he works with will be able to earn electronic badges saying things like “Congratulations: You are an energy saver” for cutting their bills.

While it might sound hokey, the strategy works. Tom Lyons, a customer of Pacific Gas and Electric in San Jose, Calif., said Opower’s feedback was reinforcing. “You’re getting some nourishment or some reward from the energy report and the smiley faces,” he said.

When his conservation efforts slip, he said, it makes him dig for the reason: extra company that month, working more from home or his daughter having a couple of sleepovers “where they were yakking, watching TV with all the lights on in the room until 3 a.m.”

States and utilities have run conservation programs for decades, with some success. Many households have compact fluorescent bulbs, Energy Star-rated appliances and even programmable thermostats.

But the current efforts are aimed at helping customers to change their habits as well.

“I think we’ve transcended the equipment and the shell of the house, and now we’re talking about the how,” said Tom Baron, senior program manager for residential energy efficiency at National Grid, an electric and gas utility in the Northeast. “Not, ‘What in my house uses energy?’ but, ‘How do I use it?’ ”

The need to find ways to encourage long-term conservation is ever more critical, utility executives and efficiency experts say. At least 25 states have set specific goals for reductions in energy use that in many cases will continue to increase even as electrical demands and the grid’s complexity keep growing.

In 2010, the total budget for utility customer energy efficiency programs was $4.6 billion, up more than four times from the $1.1 billion spent on such programs a decade earlier, according to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. The vast potential of the energy efficiency market has spurred interest in home energy management from major companies like Verizon and Comcast as well as a fleet of start-ups.

But getting people to care about their electricity and work with their utilities is a battle. Electricity is “boring and it’s cheap,” said Alex Laskey, an Opower co-founder. Many efforts have already foundered: Microsoft, Google and Cisco Systems have pulled back from their ventures, and Tendril, a start-up that works with utilities including Southern California Edison and Con Ed, lost two executives and cut its staff in May, as it raised money to finance its operations.

Part of the challenge is that while most people see saving money as a good thing, it is not enough by itself to change habits in the long term. The average household spends about 2 percent of its income on electricity, so a 10 percent reduction in power use doesn’t add up to much, Mr. Laskey said.

Instead, people can be motivated by more emotional factors, like the sense of achievement that comes from setting and reaching goals or one-upping a neighbor, or the sense of belonging that comes from mimicking friends or participating in a communitywide challenge.

Nonetheless, a little financial reward, coupled with a clear display of energy savings, can be just the nudge customers need.

One program managed by C3, a company that contracts with utilities to run loyalty programs, awards participants two points for every kilowatt-hour less in electricity they use each month compared with the year before they joined. Customers can redeem the points for gift cards or discounts at places like Staples and Amazon.com, or local restaurants and shops. The company uses demographic and behavioral information to present specific offers to customers — discounts on school supplies in the fall to households with children, for instance, said Tom Scaramellino, senior vice president and general manager of C3.

Mark Lattanzi, who has been in the program for about a year through the Western Massachusetts Electric Company, said he had shaved about a third off his bill, through replacing his old electric water heater and a range of small behavior changes like turning off the lights and using the clothesline. It helps, he said, to receive an automatic monthly e-mail that shows how his electricity use compares with the same month in his baseline year.

And the rewards points are an incentive, too. Mr. Lattanzi has already earned a $10 gift card for Whole Foods and is waiting to use the rest at restaurants that are joining the program.

“Restaurants that I already go to are giving me discounts and gift cards because I saved a little money on my electric bill?” he said. “That’s a win-win.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/24/business/in-energy-conservation-utilities-focus-on-bragging-rights.html?pagewanted=all

Social Sites See Games as Key to Power Grid Savings

Written by Robert McGarvey

Internet Evolution

Can Vasillis Nikolopoulos do what Larry Page, Steve Ballmer, and John Chambers could not? That trio of tech titans has thrown in the towel when it comes to harnessing computer innovation to lower our energy consumption.

Meanwhile, Nikolopoulos, a spunky entrepreneur based in Greece and co-founder of the energy usage monitoring firm Intelen, believes differently.

“There is a huge opportunity here. In an Athens pilot, we drove energy savings of 35 percent,” says Nikolopoulos.

He just may know something the US CEOs don’t. So may Mark Zuckerberg (more on him later).

The core idea in Silicon Valley has been that by using powerful tools -- WiFi, RFID, and the like -- to build out a so-called smart grid, it will be easy to know how much energy a home or business uses and then to find ways to reduce it.

Just one problem: In a down economy, willingness to spring for energy-saving technologies -- such as solar panels or upgrades of attic insulation -- is challenged. And willingness to spend on energy monitoring tools is even scarcer. When you are struggling to pay a utility bill, spending more -- even when it's associated with a promise of eventual cost reductions -- is a tough sell. And this is not changing soon. (Witness the Google-Microsoft-Cisco surrenders.)

Execs on the front line admit as much. Honeywell Automation and Control Solution CEO Roger Fradin recently told India’s Economic Times: "In all honesty, I know smart grids make good press but I think it will take 10 years for it to become a meaningful part of my business... Everybody talks about it, but very few companies are actually doing anything about it."

Nikolopoulos gets that difficulty, but he thinks it will be easy to persuade us to play games where points are earned for cutting energy use. And it gets easier still when the game occurs on the social Web. Call this Energy Efficiency 2.0, says Nikolopoulos; previous efforts have gotten the order of things reversed.

Typically, the effort involved encouraging high-tech investment that would drive behavior change, he said, but that has not worked. What he preaches is using social networks -- at little or no cost -- to drive behavior change that may in turn trigger willingness to invest in greater energy reduction.

Think of this as Farmville, or Mafia Wars, except with positive social benefits involved.

This is where Mark Zuckerberg enters the fray: Facebook recently announced it has joined forces with a firm called Opower to unveil a new app that will turn energy savings into a game. The app is tentatively slated to launch in the first quarter of 2012.

Facebook won’t be the only player in the attempt to drive energy efficiencies via social nets. Nikolopoulos, for instance, says his company, Intelen, is busily developing similar games that he hopes soon to pilot in Boston and San Francisco.

Other players are on the horizon -- such as a startup aptly named Efficiency 2.0 -- because suddenly it seems a solution to this longstanding problem just may be within reach.

And it will be a solution implemented by consumers playing games. Not by technology giants.

Says Nikolopoulos, “In a social net, you will be able to compare your usage with your neighbors, with quick glances at graphs that we can update continuously. This will provide real motivation. People will want to save energy.”

Are there potential problems? Nikolopoulos acknowledges a hot button is privacy; just about anybody could tell if you are home or away, in the office or not, when energy use graphs are online. That needs to be addressed -- probably by camouflaging player identities -- but Nikolopoulos says those are nits that will be picked.

The exciting bottom line is that if these social gurus are right, we are on the cusp of seeing significant energy reductions -- just because of games people play. “When we harness the social network effect, we will see very good results,” says Nikolopoulos.

— Robert McGarvey has been online and writing about the Internet for nearly 25 years.

http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=852&doc_id=235127&f_src=internetevolution_gnews

Seattle City Light's usage comparison report irks some

By Denise Whitaker Published: Nov 4, 2011


KOMO News


SEATTLE -- Some may say information is power. But some Seattle City Light customers don't like the utility's pilot program that compares their energy usage to their neighbors'. 


Seattle City Light spokesman Andrew Gibbs said the home electricity report was designed to inspire homeowners to think of new ways to conserve energy. 


"We've weatherized a lot of houses, helped people install a lot of efficient light bulbs. We needed to do something a little bit different," he said. 


The report lists how many kilowatt hours the customer is using, then compares the figure to that of the customer's neighbors. The report also ranks the customer in comparison with 99 others in the area. 


Some customers say the report is a waste of money, paper and resource. Others say it's just downright intrusive. But Gibb says it's just information, and the report includes tips on making the customer's home more efficient. 


"It's not trying to judge anyone," he said. "It's not trying to say you're a bad person (if) you're using more energy."


Consumer looking to identify the electricity vampires in their house can check out a kill-a-watt meter from the local library. The meter measures how much electricity each appliance uses. Consumers may then decide to switch to a more efficient model of appliance or change the settings on their computer. 


"And that's really the most powerful thing -- to give people information about actions they can take to make their home more efficient, save money," Gibb said, adding consumers can save $25 for every 300 kilowatt hours cut. 


Customers who do not want their energy use outlined in a home electricity report can choose to opt out. 


Puget Sound Energy also provides a home energy report to customers in East King County.


http://www.komonews.com/news/local/133282843.html

Cape Business News

Energy Efficiency Forum Launched

The South African Property Owners Association (SAPOA), working in collaboration with the South African Council for Shopping Centres (SACSC), Eskom and the City of Cape Town is launching a new Energy Efficiency Forum for commercial property owners and managers on 21 October at the Civic Centre in Cape Town.

This forum is also supported by the Green Building Council of South Africa (GBCSA), Provincial Government of the Western Cape and Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT). 

The Energy Efficiency Forum aims to provide owners and managers of offices, shopping centres, hotels and other commercial and public buildings with practical knowledge on energy efficiency solutions, and will also serve as a platform for collective action and shared learning.

Vuyani Hako, Chairman of the SAPOA Western Cape region says, “Energy efficiency has become increasingly critical in the context of rising electricity tariffs and a medium-term shortage of supply. The economic recession, forthcoming legislation and the need to reduce environmental impact are also important considerations that call for a concerted effort towards finding solutions and working with other commercial property owners to improve energy efficiency.”

The formation of the Energy Efficiency Forum follows a recent SAPOA workshop, held in September 2009. This workshop was well attended, with excellent participation from commercial property delegates. And it was here that it was decided that there is a definite need for a regular forum to address energy efficiency issues and provide ongoing education on energy related matters.

http://www.cbn.co.za/print/daily/4169.html