 My name is Mariana Grossman. I'm executive director of Sustainable Silicon Valley and thrilled to be moderating the panel on social networking for energy. We've heard that theme come up a number of times today in other sessions. We're really lucky to have an outstanding panel. I'll introduce some in a moment. One of the things that seems to be happening in the energy industry is really integration with information technology and communications. And social media is a really important part of that. So as people start to have more access to energy information and the companies have more access to what people are doing, there's an opportunity for giving people feedback and engaging people and using this information differently than we ever have before. It also raises all kinds of exciting interest issues about privacy and policy and their opportunities for things that we could be doing that maybe regulations may be inhibiting or there maybe regulations should be inhibiting. And what that's one of the things we'll be talking about is do people own their own data? Who's in charge of that? And what is it for? And how do we use it to accomplish the goals of having energy be used to support better lifestyles with more efficiency and more fun? So I would like to introduce our panelists and then they're going to each have a few minutes to talk and then we'll have a bit of a conversation among the panel and then we'll open it up to the floor. So on my left is Andy Campbell from Tendril Energy or tendril.com and Zeke Housefather from C3 Energy and Marcy Scotland from Facebook and she'll be talking about their use of O-Power which was mentioned in the previous panel here is an investment of Trey and KPCB. So I'm going to turn it over to you. Thank you. Well thanks for having me. Thanks for having Tendril at this event. It's been stimulating past few sessions. I'm going to make a few framing remarks around social media and energy, kind of some remarks about what that means to Tendril as well as provide some examples of some social media and energy that we've been involved with some of the projects that we have going on. First is briefly who is Tendril. So we're a software company. We're focused on providing insight and control to residential electric gas consumers and we do that by partnering with with energy service providers, utilities being a prime category of those, as well as with other companies, appliance manufacturers, other types of companies that want to have a relationship with consumers related to energy. We're based in Boulder, Colorado. We have several other offices. I'm based here in the Bay Area. We also have folks in Amsterdam and in Melbourne, Australia. And one element of what we do, there's really two big pieces in terms of the applications that our products that our services offer. One which I'm not going to talk about so much is really control kind of this this concept which came up in the last session in this room around sort of beyond the beyond the electric meter, the control devices within the home, the concept of smart appliances, smart thermostats, Nest lab being a prime example of a smart thermostat. Another element of what we do which we see is really critical to bring consumers into this sort of thinking about energy is we have a behavioral web portal and that's based on concepts of really behavioral mechanisms, goal setting, driving people to action and providing regular feedback to consumers around that. Then thinking about sort of what's social, we think about social media broadly and certainly in the energy context you should think about it broadly. So the kind of web 2.0 sharing world that we're in now, there's examples of social media certainly include things like Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube which are very active, very interactive forms of social media but equally social or also social are other things where there's user-generated content. So think of Amazon or Netflix where users are typing in reviews and things like that. So there's an interaction going on there that's maybe a bit more static than what you might have let's say a Facebook interaction but it still is social and it's importantly it's consumer-driven content. When we think of it there's a 190 rule of interaction around social media online. So the 1% of people are heavy contributors and you may have if you're on Facebook you may have some of these friends who like seems like they're constantly posting something. You wonder what else they do with their time and then there's 9% occasional contributors. So now and then you may post a review of something on Yelp or or something else but then 90% of people are really readers and I think an important point if thinking about yourself and I'll say I don't really consider myself as a heavy user of social media but I do use social media quite a bit in this last category of readers you know sort of lurk around and read about my friends on on Facebook or another prime example which I think is very relevant to energy is often if I have say an IT problem a problem with my computer the first thing I'll do before if it's out you know my work computer before I call it IT department even as I'll do a quick google search and type in the problem I'm having and chances are what will pop up or a number of message boards places where people have had the same problem I have had I'll read through that very often I'll find a solution to that problem and I'm not actually really necessarily adding anything to the conversation but but it was a very much a a social interaction between in this case other people that ended up helping me solve a problem that I would have had trouble solving or would have taken longer to solve otherwise. Then this is my my last slide talking a little bit about some examples from projects that we've been involved with so we you know we think a very key part of engaging consumers around energy is is an idea of comparison collaboration and competition so one particular project which I'll mention we have a project in Cape Cod where there's a small a you call a municipal aggregation type of energy service provider there and they offer our web portal to their consumers and there's two elements of the of the social piece of that that are very important one there's this this concept we have called ask an expert and that's where we have sort of these expert users that we seed the discussion with so someone in this case these are consumers that have access to very granular data from their their meters they have smart meters and they actually have continuous instantaneous information about what's happening in their home and this is totally new information for for most people so it's not in common on this message board is someone will say you know what is this strange spike going on you know at at 8 a.m. and they'll just post a question you know query on to the board and some of the ask these experts who initially in this early stage or often employees of ours will come on with their expertise and say well that's probably you know your it's uh one I was reading was something pretty pretty obscure that would never would have thought of but people who live on hills often have pumps that that pump out have to pump up the sewage up the hill and apparently that causes some very unusual spikes in electricity usage you know when you have a very localized social network you can actually hone in on some very localized causes like that and then another example is is the someone had some questions about they were experimenting with some some some dimmable CFL lights they had problems with that they posted online hey this isn't really working for me anyone else have experiences then other people came in and said well yeah I've actually you know had some similar problems or I've started adopting some led lights to solve this problem and so people actually found solutions which satisfied a need they had and also in this case saved energy for them too so I'll pass it on for them one of the things I did decided was to save a little time and not do long introductions because there are good bios in the book so if you want to know and each of our speakers also is public sector and private sector background which I think is pretty interesting combination hello everyone so I'm Zeke Hausfather from C3 and I'm going to talk a little bit about how to engage customers around energy efficiency because one of the single biggest problems we run into is simply gaining mindshare making people care enough about energy to take the time and effort to take action and to realize meaningful savings before I dive into that let me give a really brief introduction to C3 as a company so C3 was started in 2009 by Tom Siebel of Siebel Systems fame they primarily started as a large commercial and industrial energy management company they later moved on to small and medium business I actually helped co-found a company called Efficiency 2.0 that was purchased a little over a month ago now by C3 we primarily started in the residential space and did a bit of small and medium business as well and together we sort of covered the entire utility stack providing energy efficiency services to utility companies large commercial industrial and small and medium business like that PG&E here in California as well as residential for example Southern California Edison here in California and one of the biggest challenges in motivating customers to save energy is as I mentioned this mindshare issue and it's really hard to gain mindshare especially on the residential level for commercial and industrial and small and medium business at least the more medium side of small and medium business they tend to be more rational actors if you give them a reasonable return of investment and access to capital most of them will convert on energy efficiency behaviors residential is a lot harder there's been a lot of studies about why residential customers don't necessarily convert and if you look at sort of empirical studies of purchasing behavior residential customers will have up to 40 discount rate on energy efficiency investments which is huge compared to most other areas of their life and there's a couple different barriers that have to be overcome to get residential customers really engaged and really saving energy the first is simply information information is an important part of the solution it's not the entire solution but it is an important part there's a really interesting study last year in proceedings of National Academy of Sciences actually that looked at what people perceive the energy savings are from common home energy saving actions and what they actually are and people tended to get the small things right they got around ballpark estimates for things like CFLs program well a little bit less so for programmable thermostats but when you get into the larger energy saving things you know replacing furnaces air sealing high efficient air conditioners they're really far off and usually they thought they saved a lot less than they actually did some information is big and an important part of information is specific targeting of information to individual customers what's going to be right for a home in Maine and home in Florida is going to be completely different and even within a particular utility service territory what's going to be right for an apartment in LA and a larger house in the suburbs is going to be completely different thankfully there's a lot of different data sources that are out there most of them publicly available that can be combined with billing information to get a really accurate estimate of how a particular home uses energy with really minimal inputs from that particular user the last thing we want to do as part of an interactive website is ask someone a 30 question form about their home we're going to lose 99 of them right there so by pulling things like parcel level property records from county tax assessment offices where we can get the score footage of a home the year it was built number of veterans number of bathrooms if they've an adequate basement if they have a pool exterior surface material space heating fuel the cooling equipment type in some cases pulling in their interval usage data from our utility partners pulling in hourly temperature data from thousands of weather stations pulling in a whole bunch of these really high-resolution data we can get we can estimate how a home uses energy and more importantly we can look for unusual patterns and outliers so for example we can look at a particular neighborhood and find out the elasticity of cooling use so how much one additional degree hour causes an increase in cooling use for each home in that neighborhood we can normalize it per square foot we can look within certain brackets of square feet and we can figure out who are the outliers and we can message them around that we can say hey Jim we noticed last summer used about 20 percent more energy for cooling than similar homes in your neighborhood here's three simple ways for you to save on cooling energy this summer that sort of targeting which is really allowed by these property records by this interval data is really effective in converting people into action because you're giving them timely and actionable recommendations that they can take you're not just giving them a generic list of tips so this type of information can be put together in a number of useful ways to do analytics to leverage all this data and ultimately provide the customer with targeted and actionable recommendations that are going to be best for their home now for the five to ten percent of people who really want to dive in we can allow them to further refine that information either replacing the defaults that we provided or diving down into any individual action you know they want to install low flow showerhead they can tell us what the flow rate of their current showerhead is we can it will even give them an instructional video of how to do it by measuring their shower flow rate in a bucket now most people won't do that but there's five percent of our so folks who really want to dive down to that sort of level um and we also empower people both through information and also through other behavioral techniques and one of the ones we employ is rewards one of the biggest challenges in the u.s around energy efficiency is energy is too cheap if you're working in somewhere like arkansas and the marginal rate is five cents a kilowatt hour it's going to be really hard to print people in energies so we've done a lot with reward systems with both local and national merchants we've also done a lot with regular feedback so whenever bills come in on a monthly basis telling people how much reward prints they got they have what they can redeem them for giving them additional targeted tips we've done a lot of work with lotteries so this was a great promotion we did in com ed uh chicago area where one in 20 people who signed up got a free summer of electricity which sounds like it would be expensive it actually gives a very reasonable sort of cost per acquisition to the web program and then i'm running out of time so i'll skip over a few things and finally targeting is really important the demographics of an individual segment of customers is going to affect their energy is a lot and we want to be able to buy up information about the magazines people purchase about their political affiliations about their various demographics not to show them and not to scare them because frankly some of that is is kind of creepy that all that's out there but to target them with the right messaging are they someone who's going to care about carbon are they someone who's going to care about saving money are they someone who's going to care about a world roads program and we find some really interesting stuff through our research this is one of the cooler ones we found in a program that folks who were dieters were much less likely to save over time than folks who are not dieters so three to four percent savings versus ten to twelve percent savings similarly people at a really high loans relative to the value of their home were also much less likely to save and save and around the same rate range so putting all this data together using it to intelligently target residential customers and giving them sort of the motivations and awards that are going to best fit their particular profile is from what we can see the best way to get traction and get real savings thank you this one okay um hi so i'm not i'm here from the social side of the social plus energy as opposed to from the energy side and out so i'll talk a little bit about why facebook is interested in this like how we got into this and then mostly i want to just talk about what we are doing you know that relates to this conversation um as a company we're pretty laser focused on our own energy efficiency specifically where it matters the most for us which is in our data centers and probably about a year ago we it kind of dawned on us that um for everything that we'll do in terms of efficiency and the sustainability of our own operations and our data centers we have these 900 plus million people on our platform that if we could just activate them on some of these issues the power of that dwarfs anything we would do ourselves and so we really started honing in on this idea of how do we add social solutions to some of society's biggest challenges and specifically we were thinking about energy efficiency it's something big for us it's not something as Zeke was saying it's not something that consumers think about a lot in fact after we started meeting with opower they told us the average consumer thinks about their energy use for six minutes a year and so you know one of one of the things we wanted to do was to get people thinking more about that and so we partnered up with opower and nrdc and facebook for us to be the platform for making what opower already does and social and and our inspiration for this was the uh what was i'm totally blanking on the name in the 80s this project that nrdc did about energy efficiency in um in oregon and they were trying to figure out how to get people to have make more energy efficient choices and they were they were planning on doing this whole program with billboards etc and what they learned was that the most effective way to get people to change their energy behavior was word of mouth neighbor to neighbor and so this was really inspiring for us because you know facebook is modern day word of mouth and so so we teamed up the three of us to create what we call the social energy app i'm sure everyone in this room because your energy enthusiasts knows what i'm talking about or has signed up if not i hope by the end of this you go straight to your facebook account which i'm sure all of you have and you do sign up for it so i'm just going to show you some screenshots and talk a little bit about what it is um so as i said our our goal you know our basic goal was to get was to spark a conversation about energy efficiency we you know i think over the longer term we have a lot of goals about behavior change and you know actual savings and and environmental impact but you know our our most basic goal was to just spark a conversation which is something that facebook does really well so we worked with opower and nrdc and opower worked with their utility customers to enable people to log into opower with their facebook account and actually be able to connect directly to your utility so you sign in this way you you can also sign in without facebook and you also don't have to connect directly to your utility if your utility isn't part of this network we have i think uh 17 utilities right now which covers about 21 million households in uh in the us so you log in with facebook and you enter your you can connect directly for in my case it's pgne comment is one of the options you connect directly with your utility and the first thing you'll see is this comparison so um what your use it's kilowatt hours right now we're not um natural gas isn't there yet and i think longer term opower is looking to add things like water and things like that but for right now it's just electricity so you see your use you see similar homes in your area and then you see like what's considered efficient so this person is amazing um and then you get little messages about you know like good job and an opportunity to make it social put share it to your facebook page and actually we opower recently introduced some actions so that this share to facebook is can now be more automatic so you can log in and it can share to facebook that you are checking your energy use for the month of may or whatever it is and so then another option is that you know so presumably you have friends in here your friends who signed up when you sign up you get the option to invite your friends to join and then you can see how you and your friends stack up against each other in any given month um which goes to the point about competition and comparison and the things that are going to hopefully motivate people and then and so this really gets to the heart of like what we what we were really interested in at the start which is to drive conversations that might otherwise not be happening so these are some examples of you know really early users you know posting things to facebook and and people commenting um i have my own example of this which is my old department was really poorly insulated and i was cold all the time and and we had our heat on so many hours of the it's like embarrassing i'm not even going to tell you what what it was but um so we finally bought a heated mattress pad and we're able to lower our heat several like a number of degrees and it and i couldn't believe the difference in my bill and so i posted something to facebook show you know showing my usage and i said something like you know thanks thanks heated mattress pad and and had like 10 or 15 comments we had a whole conversation oh where'd you get your heated mattress pad i didn't know you could do that and and that's the kind of thing that we are hoping to spark is like these initial conversations get people thinking more than those six minutes and and then eventually taking action and then down the line you know are this is the taking action piece in the hopes to drive behavior change so within the app you can compare you can um you know get your own data compared to your friends etc and then you can learn about what are some things that you can do whether it's you know the cfl chain you know it's everything from changing out your light bulbs to buying more energy efficient appliances etc so we're pretty excited about we're pretty excited about the potential we launched i think eight or nine weeks ago we're seeing like pretty good adoption it's slow we keep adding new features we're trying to really get the utility companies to engage with their customers to get people to sign up and i you know we're going to plan there's a whole evaluation piece that we're actually partnering the pre-court center is part of at some point like you're going to look into evaluation and measurement and we're really helpful and excited about the potential for this thank you i have a a couple of questions for you one is what do you think and i put each of you to answer this what do you think motivates people to want to save energy is it for money for climate change for energy security some of those themes that have come up today in the conference yeah and our view is that people are different and you know we've done our own kind of customer segmentation exercise and we broke that down into the four categories you could break it down different ways but some people are motivated by green some people are motivated by wanting to seem green which is different you know more likely maybe not the early adopters but the fast followers um others motivated by money some people are just very skeptical and you have to think about different ways to engage them so i think people are diverse that's what's great about social media as opposed to you know more traditional top-downs you know utility or one you know one company that's trying to do mass media is they're going to miss you know 95 percent of customers because everyone's everyone has different things that they're going to respond to so uh i think uh i agree with you and i think we're all going to agree that you know there is no one-size-fits-all solution for messaging um and i think it is really important to be able to target people effectively with the messaging that'll work for them and a big part of that is testing you know you're going to get it wrong a lot but you want to be able to to run all of your experiments as a v test to see what messaging works for which group of people do you get more people enrolled in a program with normative comparisons or rewards do you get more people with a carbon related focus if they have this demographic than that demographic versus the savings versus rewards so there's a lot of work that needs to be done in that and we've been trying to do a lot of it um though we're not perfect um to really be able to because we're dealing with the very limited timeshare here and often you know we either get people or we don't and so we really need to be aware that our first contact with them is very important so we need to tailor that message as much as possible to what we think is going to work best yeah i think i think from our point of view what's so interesting about what we're trying to do and using facebook to do it is that what people it's not as much people caring about energy efficiency it's people caring about their friends and what their friends are doing what their friends are talking about and people being able to learn from what their friends are doing and sharing and talking about and discover things that way so it might actually be that you're not a person who thinks you care at all about energy efficiency but you know your friend sarah posted something about looking at her energy use and now that looks cool it's a cool icon and people are talking about it and so now you're going to go check it out so i think it's it's less about what's motivating you specifically on energy efficiency and just this ability to um have friends sharing information and motivating each other to discover new things on facebook and and this being one of those things i recently learned something about the difference between rewards and making things into a game or i guess there's a new verb or gamification and the features of a game or that you opt in that it's fun that it's challenging that you that there's variety that you get new skills you get motivation recognition and mastery and reward so it's not just rewards and i'm wondering to the extent you're experimenting with gamification versus just pure rewards and then also uh sometimes with the energy savings of the savings themselves aren't really that much for most people's budget depending at least in california that's often the case and um but if they could give the surplus savings to a school or some charity they care about that might be or their church or something that might be an additional kind of reward so i'm just wondering kind of what are you experimenting with with respect to either making things that like a game or uh in experimenting with reward systems um well first i want to say gamification is hard there's been a lot of folks out there have tried to make energy games that are compelling and and they've by and large with a couple exceptions been abysmal failures um there are aspects of gamification that you can include one thing that we've experimented with for example is rewarding people for behavioral streaks so if you reduce your energy use relative to your own benchmark or a neighbor uh comparison benchmark five days in a row you get a bonus stuff like that small little things to keep people engaged in going back but overall it's it's difficult to include that many elements of gamification to make it work well it's it's something we're we're always trying to work toward but i'm i'm a little bit leery of tossing up that term too much but the second thing you mentioned is is actually really interesting and this is allowing people to contribute rewards back to charities back to their local schools and i'd add to that a third thing which is allowing people to get energy efficient products as rewards so you sort of have a virtuous cycle and and we've had some positive experience with that and it's something that we definitely like to pursue yeah i mean so just the way that we're looking at it for the app that opower is developing is intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation so the intrinsic being the like i'm king of the mountain or just these kind of badges that you get when you make certain achievements and that's just going to be like i'm motivated by being able to post this to my profile show everybody that i've achieved something and then the extrinsic piece which would be rewards whether it be from the utility company or other kinds of partners that are interested in participating we haven't built that part out yet but i know that like the the intrinsic piece is coming pretty soon for the app and the extrinsic piece is is on the roadmap so it's we think it's an important piece of it and then one more question before we open it to the audience um what do you think is the right balance between privacy and and uh kind of giving people enough information to make a difference i think so we heard some some things about the kind of insight people have you know are you home or not um what are your uses of energy that sort of thing so i think we'll start with Andy yeah for our standpoint it's very important issue the key is that that a consumer has control over their own data and even that is not in the utility in the energy space it's not broadly accepted or implemented i mean most people do not have access to their own energy usage data many people if you live here in northern california or other places you have a smart meter which is recording tremendous detail about how you use energy but you don't have access to any of that data um so first piece of it is is just getting established and we viewed through as being a legislative regulatory issue that consumers have the right to get access to their own data and preferably in a in a standardized machine readable format so that could that information could be made useful not just sort of looked at as a graph or something um and the privacy element to that is important too but really i guess our views consumers need to be able to control that themselves if people have different preferences around privacy and certainly companies need to uh to you know take a very cautious view toward privacy and and you know we believe in informed consent is a basic sort of standard that we're not going to pass data to someone else unless the consumer has consented and they understand what they are consenting to do but then once a consumer has the data or we believe consumers should have the freedom to really um put it all out there if they want to or to keep it very private yeah privacy is critical the last thing we want is is some big you know data hacking incident to undermine sort of people's faith and the ability of third parties to regulate or to manage this sort of data um and i think by and large the PUCs have done a reasonable good job that varies a bit state by state and establishing fairly strict standards for utilities in terms of providing data to third parties for some of the other data that's out there stuff like axiom data property records uh that stuff can be useful but from our experience it should never really be displayed to the customer the last thing we want to do is scare people by saying hey we just found all the stuff out about you a lot of that can happen under the hood it can be used to drive targeted useful analytics but all the customer should really see is the end result the the targeted actionable message for that customer not all the information that goes under it that said they should see the bills of course i mean so in this context the the way the privacy issue applies to facebook is in terms of what you share to facebook because the way the app is designed you log in with your facebook account but all of your data lives on opower servers so facebook has no insight into anything about your energy use or anything so um the issue is more about being clear and giving um people the options to share or not share to control how much or how little information actually gets posted onto their facebook timeline which you know is um entirely up to the user we have inline privacy controls and and all of that so um but in terms of that kind of privacy about your your data around your usage and stuff that that's all is on opower servers and they're not here to talk about it so great questions from the audience and just please raise your hand when you get the microphone introduce yourself your name and and their question ben over here when made a question to see three gentlemen where is the maximum potential for saving energy at the lowest cost is it industrial sector residential sector or commercial sector so i would actually argue that at this point it's probably concentrated in both small and medium businesses and residential a lot of the lowest hanging fruit has been picked for medium and large c&i there's a lot of really good escos out there and energy management companies that have done a good job historically and there's still a long way to go i don't want to make it sound like it's solved but the real low hanging fruit is is in residential and small commercial and one of the big challenges there is getting the regulatory frameworks right so we can run the sorts of behavior based programs that we do that the dope power and tender will have been working on that really can they're not device specific it's not you know we're going to give you a $50 rebate for this widget it's allowing people to do multiple actions in their homes to reduce energy use and figuring out a way to to or having regulatory acceptance of methods to verify the savings and and we've really seen much lower costs than traditional utility programs through those sort of measures could you give an example of regulatory barrier that gets in the way of that uh sure so traditionally energy efficiency programs have largely been done through dean savings through sir slow down a little bit sorry traditionally a utility regular utility evaluation has primarily been done through deemed savings you install five air conditioners you get this much energy savings per air conditioner you install moving away from that towards sort of a whole home analysis actually looking at how people's bills change over time uh has been a bit of a transition in california has really led the way in acceptance of these sort of protocols both for fully randomized experimental design like what opower does for its mailers and quasi experimental design where you have people opting into the program and you have to control for self selection bias and there's been a lot of really good stuff happening especially in california on that front over the last year or two that's also happening with things like street lights where you actually are metering the actual thing instead of saying a street light typically does this if you have a smart street light that can dim or you know react to moonlight or sense of presence of people that sort of thing great another question yes right here okay and oh you have the mic already so you first and then you okay please stand up so we can see you and introduce yourself i'm bono the level i am the CEO of a new company that is i call myself an energy coach and we are working for the residential market so we are energy coach going out in in very specific residential areas in the silicon valley where all these big mentions are built so we are aiming at very very high user in electricity and we are giving very specifics and we are doing actually the retrofits for them you know and we are speaking about led retrofits we are speaking about poor smart smart smart power strips stuff like that so i have i have actually one problem is my customer are very very interested in comparing their data to their neighbors am i doing well or not so we are doing we are using opower we are using facebook opower application the material the data that are published on these right now on this side are very difficult to compare because this is raw data and i it's kilowatts kilowatts hour per month and it doesn't mean anything of course because you are comparing houses that are different in size some some of my customers are using electric cars some are not some are using acs some are not do you have a question so the question is how can we standardized this data for the customer for the users to be able to compare really what are their energy intensity great andi yeah so there's there's a lot of effort in that area there's there's something that known as the green button which is a new initiative that was launched by the white house chief technology officer and the green button is basically a standardized form uh for energy usage data it was initially targeted at sort of smart meter type data and it's in a form that because it's standardized every utility that implements this standard will implement it in the same way then an application developer can have an expectation that they can develop a nationwide application and you know the challenge of it though is it's a voluntary initiative utilities have to decide for some reason whatever their motivation is that there's something that they want to make available the california utilities have you know most utilities have not and um and so it's a continued challenge is just getting that data getting it in a standardized form especially just in the monopoly dominated market where the monopolies don't necessarily see it as in their interest to to enable access to that data you want to answer that just really quick one thing that might be useful for you to look into is is again integrating with something like green button and as you do these coaching for different homes you'll build up a database of of home characteristics and energy use data you can use to do your own benchmarking i mean the challenge is without uh the data that someone like us or opower has which in many cases is the usage for everyone in the for the entire utility it's really hard to do those sort of benchmarks uh so i'd suggest trying to build your own database and work from there marcia did you want okay next question please oh just hold it right up to your mouth they'll turn it on for you okay yeah just right up there yeah first of all i'd like to thank marcia for this heated pair measures pet thank you for sharing this information yeah and i actually have the question to you um it has two sides one thing why do you think that people will be interested in sharing their utility electricity power spending on facebook it's one part of the question and another part what are the key expectations from the utilities who are participating in their opower so i think in terms of why we think people will be interested it's more people do a lot of stuff on facebook that um that to to discover people are always interested in discovering things that their friends are interested things that people that they know are connected to are doing on facebook so they're at no point by using this app do you publish your um you can choose to publish your actual numbers the dollar amount etc that's not actually part of the flow it's more about posting that you're looking at it we're going to get to a point pretty soon where when you um look for tips and tricks on how to save that you're post that so i think part of why people are interested is just to people like to be who they are on facebook and if it's something that you're doing and that you're making part of your life you want to tell people about it and then other people say oh you know you're spending time doing that i'm going to check that out and then they you know they're either interested or they're not um so in terms of why we think people will be interested and people like to share and people just like to share their authentic selves on facebook and so when this becomes a part of who you are and what you're doing it's you know we're in this sharing mode of our lives right now where that's what we do and so um and then the second part of your question i forgot the second part why utilities are interested in participating in this project yeah so opower primarily opower um is the one dealing with the utilities but my understanding as to why utilities are interested is because utilities are looking to expand and change their relationships with their customers and utility i mean there there's a whole other presentation that we have just about how the utility sector is really looking at social as a way to better engage with their customers because they they're also interested in driving energy efficiency from you know from different demands from regulators etc and so um i think they're really looking at just adding a dimension of how they talk to and learn from and deal with their customers and to just bring themselves into the new you know what's going on right now in technology and how people communicate with each other in fact um commissioner sound of all from the public utilities commission was just mentioning they're going to be bringing down nuclear power plants that serve san diego and la and they need to do demand response during the summer and social media is a great way to do that so having people having that two-way flow and there's some people who are more likely to be using something like twitter than they would be reading their utility insert or something else the other question that she mentioned was languages and and is everything in english are you actually doing multiple languages and i'm interested in that for all the speakers and then we'll go back to audience at the moment where u.s. only and everything is in english we've done some spanish implementation we're also looking into uh doing korean and a few other languages soon i believe we're mostly english today but as soon as there's an opportunity we'll quickly translate she was saying vietnamese the biggest vietnamese populations are in san jose and la outside of vietnam so add that one to your list okay do you have a mic over here where i don't know where the mic went okay there is thanks and please remember to say your name when you stand up thanks hi my name is kara malpher i'm a student at the Stanford graduate school of business i'm working at nest actually this summer and my question is are there other countries or just other regions in the world where we could learn from where some of these implementations have been done like europe or i'm just not familiar with kind of outside of california really where the kind of the startup environment is where people are really working hard on bringing the the whole social networking and behavior change aspects of energy efficiency into play as well as just on the more labor intensive you know retrofitting projects just good examples from the world i think one place that i would point to possibly is australia that's in part because australia has a totally deregulated a restructured energy market where everyone gets their electricity from a competitive retailer some of the european markets are similar and so those retailers have to be very competitive and very much more customer attuned than in some of the u.s markets so we have a big project with origin energy which is a big retailer there so you know that might be a good place to look the caveat though is i've recently been planning a vacation to australia and been trying to do that online and in australia they're like they're pretty bad about online stuff so it's impossible to make reservations and things so i don't know that they're they're the best in terms of being all wired up and and engaged online i'm uh i'm not as familiar with the details but i know that in the nordic countries there's been some interesting efforts particularly around sub metering and tracking behaviors i know that there's a one of the best databases of like individual appliance level sub metered usage is swedish i know in the uk actually they're they're looking to follow our lead in some ways and opower just recently launched a program there we've been talking to a bunch of utilities there so there's there's a definitely a two-way flow of information around these things speaking of sub metering what about multi-family homes and renters which are about half the residential market how are you addressing that so for us we we definitely try to track that both renting versus owning as well as uh apartments versus houses some of that can be gotten from property records uh more the apartment house rather than rent and we tailor the recommendations appropriately so we're not going to tell someone to turn out their water heater temperature if they don't live in a house or to retrofit their windows or to do air sealing or any of the sort of larger home retrofit things that most renters or apartment owners wouldn't have direct control over well renters might have if they're in a house would have control over the water heater temperature but um there is a larger issue in some cases with sort of principal agent dilemmas you know if a renter doesn't pay for how much they use it's a lot harder to motivate them around things like that and in many cases they can't even get access to programs because they don't have the utility account number and that's a challenge we don't have a good solution for yet yeah and that i mean an interesting place to look over the next couple years will be new york city where the mayor is basically mandated that all master metered residential buildings be sub metered and that's just about to happen and and so it's too early to say how that's you know what companies are kind of technologies are going to be offered to help help people in that scenario because it will not be a utility project it's going to be building owners that you know pretty much again and for the for the app it's connected to your bill so it's you know whether you're a renter or a homeowner if you pay the bill that's the utility bill is what drives the opower social app so if you're if you're in a multi-family you may not have a bill may it just may be included in your rent except for maybe yeah then it's whoever pays the bill yeah okay more questions in the back uh yeah no different but i'm on the faculty here at stanford um i just have a question about the the limit of the social um the social network uh to achieve uh the energy efficiency is if we have some kind of theoretical potential gain in energy efficiency how far can social go all the way on its own without um without the energy provider it's interesting that you know even even kind on the facebook example for social it's still you know tied in with information from the energy provider etc like what's so i guess but what what fraction of the potential gain and efficiency can be achieved just from grassroots social that's a sounds like a great great uh subject of of some research um and the project we have in cape cod which the energy provider was involved with that certainly but there they there was a 10 energy savings and that was driven by the really the social interactions between the people in that that community so that's one data point i uh it's it's difficult to separate it out because there's been very few programs that are purely social i mean even opowers mailers which are normative comparisons still have energy saving recommendations on them for the larger space of behavior based efficiency programs and i actually don't really like the term behavior based because it can be everything uh we found that savings for these programs tends to range from you know about four to ten percent depending on the the program in the group um but they can also be important uh sort of lead generation for larger and deeper deeper retrofits so identifying folks who would be best served with a furnace replacement and stuff like that and directing them to local contractors and and really using that to get the 20 30 savings that uh we need i think partly that's got to do with persistence that if all you're changing is people taking shorter showers and turning up the lights that's something that you have to keep working on if you're changing the efficiency of the whole house and sealing it up and changing the furnace and automating sensory you're only heaving or cooling when people are present and that sort of thing you can permit more permanent savings perhaps so you have to kind of maybe separate out what type of savings you're getting and there's there's still a fair bit of low hanging fruit that are measure sort of installation measures that are not whole home retrofits things like low flow shower heads programmable thermostats lighting solutions and there's a lot of untapped potential in the residential market just there behaviors is also very important but i agree with you that getting measures that are going to last for 10 years and generate energy savings over that lifetime is is really important i think we have time for oh we're about out of time i don't know if we can eat a little bit of break because we got a little bit late start but i wanted to give each of the speakers a chance to kind of make a wrap up any point that you wanted to emphasize or i thought you want to leave the audience with you start andy sure yeah i i i just emphasize again the topic that came up around access to information because i you know i think there's a lot of opportunity in in social and but it's not happening today to a very large degree it's happening the context of certain projects and where it is happening that's because there is access to information because that's what really gets something to talk about gives you gives people something to talk about is um beginning to clarify puts shed some light on the black box of how people use energy um i just like to emphasize that getting people to care about energy is hard uh and we really need to be intelligent about our targeting and our messaging around that um and do as much tests as possible keep learning because frankly we don't really know that much yet and we need to know more about how best to motivate people around these things i'll just make a plug for the app social dot opower dot com if you haven't already signed up for it we're actually still in beta and so to have a group like this of you know experts and people who actually use those six minutes and more to think about energy and energy efficiency and any feedback or experiences that you would have with it we welcome and i'd like to add that sustainable silicon valley has a social um collaboration platform for people like all of us here who are working in this field and we invite you to come have this continue this conversation about social media and energy on the eco cloud and it's eco cloud hyphen sv dot com and we welcome you to come visit that site as well thank you very much for a great conversation