Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Changing behavior is big leverage: electric bill example.

Expanding on the story from Treehugger.

Buried in the bottom of this TED speech is an example of behavioral economics at work and how you can use an inexpensive approach to leverage large changes in consumption.

The bit of interest is at 10:32 - 11:20


According to this, real world testing has shown results of about 2-3% reduction in energy usage.
Using the numbers from USGBC and DOE (per earlier post):
  • a 3% savings in electricity is ~2.1% reduction in total electricity usage which is ~69TWh/yr.
  • Assuming the same 2.5kW per installation, 8hrs/day of peak generation & $21.4k/installation
  • That's $201B to replace with solar PV.
... and changing the information printed on you bill would cost a few hundred $k to a few $M in software, training, admin, development, rollout, etc...
Say $2M.
So an ROI of  > 100,000?

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