Want to reduce energy consumption?: don't depend on the consumers!

Motivating users to save energy is considered to be the holy grail of smart energy management. However, many studies have shown that changing user behavior from an energy standpoint is a very difficult problem. Furthermore, in countries such as the United States, users do not have sufficient monetary incentives to become energy conscious, given the low cost of electricity, and more generally, energy. In this paper, we study this issue in a developing economy and present a user study of 41 apartments in a high-rise apartment complex in India. Through a combination of fine-grain energy meter usage data and detailed user surveys, we find that these users may be no more energy conscious or motivated to adopt energy efficiency measures than their counterparts in Western nations. Our study challenges the belief that energy prices are higher in developing regions and hence, users in developing regions tend to be more energy-aware than those elsewhere. Consequently, and importantly, we argue that utility companies, rather than end-users, should be the vanguard for realizing energy efficiency improvement at consumer premises in order to obtain grid-wide benefits such as peak load reduction or avoiding blackouts. Towards this goal, we argue for a sustained research effort into utility-scale energy analytic approaches, for example, to identify end users who are large consumers along with the underlying causes of their consumption. Utilities can deploy such approaches and then aggressively target these users for energy efficiency improvements.