Many non-financial benefits of smart grid upgrades are as compelling as those that can save consumers money, according to second-wave findings of the SGCC Consumer Pulse Study, a national survey of U.S. energy consumers conducted for the Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative (SGCC) by Market Strategies International.

The Wave II survey, a follow-up to the initial study begun in August, was conducted with live interviewers by telephone from November 12 to December 6, 2011. A national RDD (random digit dialed) landline and cell phone sample was used. To qualify, a respondent had to be over the age of 18 and a head of household.

The sample design included an oversample of key ethnic and age groups to ensure full representation of the population. Data were weighted by age, ethnicity, gender and region to align with the US national population. The margin of error for the total sample size of 1,003 is +/- 3.1 percentage points at a confidence level of 95%.

Survey participants were asked to rate the importance of seven potential benefits of smart grid and smart meters, including ease of connecting renewable energy sources to the electric grid, reduced outages, new cost-saving rate plans, fewer new power plant investments, increased quality of power delivery, availability of near real-time energy use information and more accurate billing. Critically, each benefit was found to be important to 80% or more of respondents.

“We found that the most commonly-discussed benefits like cost saving and greater power reliability, while important, represent only a part of a broader spectrum of smart grid and smart meter benefits that are appealing to the average consumer,” said SGCC Executive Director Patty Durand. “To achieve greater impact upon a diverse customer base, utilities should take care to bring these other benefits into their marketing messages.”

Consumer education about smart grid remains vital, results show, as awareness and understanding are still lacking. 51% of consumers, a number unchanged since September 2011, say they have never heard the term smart grid, and another 21% say that they have heard the term but don’t know much about what it means.

The majority of consumers who are familiar with smart grid concepts have positive feelings about it. Consumers become increasingly favorable toward the technology after receiving more information about it.

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Simple Energy has announced its integration with the Green Button, a White House coordinated initiative that will provide more than 10 million PG&E, SDG&E, and Southern California Edison customers with their personal energy data and allow them to view the information across a variety of platforms.

The Simple Energy Customer Engagement Platform transforms this personal energy data into an online game that allows users to compete with friends and win prizes for increased energy efficiency.

Households in the service territories of California’s three largest utilities can now download their energy usage data online with one click, accessing the past year of their energy data. This data can then be seamlessly integrated with the Simple Energy platform, which helps users to understand their energy use with actionable insights and an easy points system that scores them against their Facebook friends.

“We are excited to be able to work with the Green Button initiative to provide millions of customers across California with a social, fun and simple way of understanding their own energy data,” said Yoav Lurie, CEO and co-founder of Simple Energy. “By allowing people access to their energy usage data in a meaningful way on platforms where they are already spending their time such as Facebook, we make saving energy into an easy and enjoyable experience.”

Simple Energy is the first social energy application to go live to the public, with easy data uploading now available to over 15 million homes in California and Texas. The platform is available as a web application, by email and on Facebook, with a mobile application going live this month. Soon, Simple Energy will be available to more users around the country.

The Simple Energy platform normalizes customer’s energy usage, allowing participants to compete with their friends across the country — similar to a golf handicap. In addition, players can form teams in order to compete on behalf of a cause that they support, such as a school or community organization. Finally, the program follows strict privacy guidelines, comparing normalized scores among users without revealing any personalized, individual details about actual energy use.

For Simple Energy’s utility partners, the portal product that allows for seamless integration with their consumer energy data comes standard with the Green Button export and download integration feature. This standard integration will allow utilities that decide to work with Green Button to instantly offer their customers a social, fun and simple way to understand their own energy data.

In addition, the Simple Energy portal product also supports third-party API integration with any outside vendors that utilities may opt to include. The Green Button uses a voluntary industry standard supported by efforts of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel, NAESB’s ESPI, that was developed for this more sophisticated use case.

The launch of the Green Button initiative follows the completion of an energy efficiency program piloted in San Diego, where the Simple Energy platform succeeded in more than doubling energy savings among participating residential customers during a three-month period.

“The amazing results from San Diego clearly demonstrate that the Simple Energy approach to motivating people to save energy really works,” explained Lurie. “People are naturally social and they like competing to win points and prizes. This is an intuitive way for people to easily save energy.”

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