Many people around the world live in energy poverty, spending at least 8 percent of their annual household income on energy. Solving the problem won’t be easy, but experiments by MIT researchers show that providing people with better data about their energy use and educating them on the issue could significantly reduce consumption and costs.
The experiment, carried out in Amsterdam, cut household energy bills in half, saving enough to lift three-quarters of households out of energy poverty.
“Overall, our energy coaching projects had a 75 percent success rate in reducing energy poverty,” said Joseph Llewellyn, a researcher at MIT’s Sensible City Lab and co-author of a recently published paper detailing the experimental results.
“Energy poverty affects households around the world. If they had empirical evidence of which policies are effective, governments could focus their efforts more effectively,” said Fabio Duarte, deputy director of MIT’s Understandable Cities Lab and co-author of the paper.
The paper, “Evaluating the impact of energy coaching using smart technology interventions to reduce energy poverty,” was published today in Nature Scientific Reports .
The authors are Llewellyn, who is also a researcher at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Urban Solutions (AMS) and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm; Titus Venverloo, researcher at the Sensory Cities Lab at MIT and AMS; Fábio Duarte, principal investigator at MIT’s Sensory City Lab; Carlo Ratti, director of the Sensory City Lab; and Cecilia Katzeff, Fredrik Johansson, and Daniel Pargman of KTH Royal Institute of Technology .
The researchers conducted the study after working with city authorities in Amsterdam. In the Netherlands, about 550,000 households, or 7 percent of the population, are thought to be in energy poverty. In the European Union, the figure is about 50 million. In the United States, a separate survey found that about three in 10 households report having difficulty paying their energy bills.
To conduct the experiment, the researchers ran two versions of an energy training intervention. In one version, 67 households received reports on their energy use and guidance on how to become more energy efficient. In another version, 50 households received these plus a smart device that provided real-time updates on energy consumption. (All of the homes also implemented some minor energy-saving measures to begin with, such as adding insulation.)
In both groups, households cut their monthly electricity consumption by roughly 33 percent and gas consumption by 42 percent. Their bills fell by a combined 53 percent, and the share of their income spent on energy fell from 10.1 percent to 5.3 percent.
What did these households do differently? The most significant behavioral changes include heating only the rooms that are in use and unplugging appliances that are not in use. Both of these changes save energy, but residents don’t always understand the benefits until they receive energy education.
“Energy understanding varies widely from household to household,” says Llewellyn. “When I go out somewhere as an energy coach, I never talk about the ethics of energy use. I never say, ‘Oh, you’re using too much.’ I always work with households depending on what they want from their home.”
Interestingly, households that received a small device that displayed real-time energy data tended to use the device for the first time 3-4 weeks after the orientation visit. After that, people seemed to lose interest in monitoring their energy usage frequently. However, using the device for a few weeks tends to be long enough to permanently change people’s habits.
“Our research shows that smart devices need to be accompanied by a deep understanding of what motivates families to change their behavior,” Benberloo said.
As the researchers acknowledge, working with consumers to reduce their energy consumption is only one way of helping people escape energy poverty: other “structural” factors that could help include lower energy prices and more energy-efficient buildings.
On the latter point, the paper outlines a new experiment that Llewellyn is developing in collaboration with Amsterdam authorities to investigate the benefits of retrofitting homes to reduce energy costs, in which local policymakers are exploring how to fund retrofits in a way that does not simply pass the costs on to tenants.
“You don’t want families to save on their energy bills if it also means higher rents, because then you’re just shifting costs from one item to another,” Llewellyn said.
Households can also invest in products like better window insulation and improved heating systems, but financing these products may be difficult for low-income families to come up with, especially because energy costs are “invisible” and likely a lower priority than feeding and clothing the family, Llewellyn argues.
“For households who don’t have 100 euros to spend, this is a big upfront expense,” says Llewellyn. Compared to paying for other necessities, “energy often tends to be at the bottom of the prioritization list,” he points out. “Energy is always invisible behind walls, and that’s not easy to change.”
