Accelerated Innovations’ program verifies significant energy savings reductions through behavior change
St. Paul, Minn. — Accelerated Innovations (AI) announced today that the Minnesota Department of Commerce, Division of Energy Resources determined the MyMeter program demonstrated significant energy savings reductions resulting from behavioral changes made by residential customers as a result of their interaction with MyMeter in a Minnesota multi-utility initiative.
The recent impact evaluation conducted by Illume Advising, LLC quantified the positive impact of MyMeter on participant energy usage. These approved and verified findings, allow the Minnesota participating utilities to claim behaviorally-induced energy savings in program year 2013 per application of the Average Savings Method used in the evaluation.
Average annual savings for residential customers ranged across the four participating utilities from 1.8 percent to 2.8 percent for customers opting-in to MyMeter.
These savings are roughly 20 percent higher than claims by other behavioral energy efficiency programs. Savings persisted at a steady level during the first two years of participation, and were higher for participants with higher baseline usage. Furthermore, the evaluation found that participants engaging with the energy use feedback portal over more than a six-month period achieved nearly double the savings (approaching four percent).
This engagement creates a level of transparency, that for the first time, allows the customer insight and understanding of how they are consuming energy, how much they are using and ultimately how to control and reduce their energy use.
“Customers who engage MyMeter for longer periods of time tend to save at higher rates” as described in the Illume evaluation.
“AI’s MyMeter evaluation was the best-case scenario for an evaluator,” said Anne Dougherty, Founding Advisor for Illume Advising. “The program implementer, utility, regulator and evaluator were all committed to creating the most rigorous evaluation possible to assess the impact of the MyMeter platform. It is a rare thing to have this level of collaboration in evaluation work and we hope it is a model that the industry will increasingly embrace. It took full transparency and open communication on the part of Accelerated Innovations to bring these parties together. In the end it really paid off.”
From its launch in 2008, MyMeter has been helping residential and commercial customers get a deeper understanding of their energy usage and – more importantly – has given them the tools to help manage that usage. MyMeter’s service platform is in use at dozens of electric, gas and water utilities across the country, and recently has seen its business go international.
“Our program helps utilities give their customers greater awareness and control of their energy use as demonstrated by the reduced consumption,” said Mark Brown, Chief Operating Officer for AI. “The utilities benefit as well with, among other things beyond energy savings, improved customer satisfaction, reduced calls about high bills and opportunities to recruit customers into other load management and efficiency programs. By providing tools for energy use feedback, alerts, analytics and prepaid billing, we become a trusted partner helping utilities strengthen customer engagement.”
What is MyMeter?
The MyMeter program provides proven customer engagement tools that increase customer satisfaction, drive cost-effective behavioral energy savings, and deliver economic returns through innovative billing, support of dynamic pricing and load management programs. MyMeter leverages utility smart metering infrastructure to give families and businesses greater insight into and control over their energy use.
Source: Accelerated Innovations (AI)
