HECO customers reduce use of power through program

The company running the state’s largest energy efficiency program says it will expand an initiative that helped residential utility customers in Ewa trim electricity bills by showing them how their power usage compared with their neighbors’.

Nearly 15,000 HECO customers who participated in the pilot program cut their bills by a total of $245,625 from May through October, or just under $3 per customer per month, according to Hawaii Energy.

In addition to offering energy-saving tips such as upgrading to more efficient appliances and taking shorter showers, the initiative provides utility customers with a "Home Energy Report" that ranks them against 99 anonymous neighbors living in homes of similar size and construction type. A rank of 1 indicates the lowest energy use, while 100 indicates the highest.

The report also includes a graph showing a customer’s energy consumption over time compared with all neighbors and the most efficient neighbors.

The idea behind the Home Energy Report is to make customers more aware of how much electricity they use and encourage them to make behavioral changes to reduce their consumption, according to Hawaii Energy officials. Households with lower scores are encouraged to share their energy-saving ideas with those who have higher scores.

The initiative will be expanded to 62,000 randomly selected households in Hawaii and Maui counties beginning next week. The selected households will receive four reports through June.

"Evidence shows that one of the key ways to reduce energy use is to provide homes with information about their usage and offer suggestions on what they can do to save," said Larry Newman, residential program leader for Hawaii Energy. "Based on the success of the Ewa Plain Home Energy Reports pilot and similar projects across the country, we expect the expanded initiative to generate significant savings for those on Hawaii island, Lanai, Maui and Molokai."

The expanded program is expected to cut energy use by more than 3.3 million kilowatt-hours, or the equivalent of more than $1.3 million, based on an average cost of 40 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Hawaii Energy is a customer-funded conservation and efficiency program administered by Science Applications International Corp. SAIC subcontracted Virginia-based Opower to produce the Home Energy Reports.

"Using cutting-edge behavioral science and patent-pending analytics, the Opower platform enables utilities to provide targeted energy data and advice to each customer," the company says on its website.