The results are in from San Diego Gas & Electric’s Biggest Energy Saver campaign in California, which used the Tendril Connect cloud platform, Tendril in-home smart devices, and a social media gaming application developed by Simple Energy integrated on the Tendril platform. The winner of the Biggest Energy Saver campaign, Erica Faunce of Lakeside, California, achieved a 46.5 percent energy savings, equal to 1,356 kilowatt hours for her family of three. This is the first time a social media gaming application, originally designed for Facebook, has been deployed to create a persistent dialogue between utilities and consumers around energy savings.
The campaign, which ran from Sept. 1-Nov. 30, 2011, included 200 SDG&E residential customers. The participants were selected to pit their energy efficiency skills against one another, share their results daily online through the Simple Energy social gaming application and monitor their savings in real-time through in-home energy management devices developed by Tendril and provided by SDG&E. The average savings of the San Diego participants who used the social gaming app integrated with the Tendril automated control devices was 20 percent, compared with 9 percent for those who used the devices alone. The results confirm that using behavioral science, like the Simple Energy application, in combination with device control and real-time information can increase consumer engagement and energy savings.
The smart devices included the Tendril Transport (an IP gateway), Tendril SetPoint smart thermostats, Tendril smart outlet plugs and the Tendril Insight, an in-home display that communicates with networked smart devices, such as thermostats, electricity meters and outlets, and displays information and alerts about energy consumption, rates, and cost of use.
The Biggest Energy Saver campaign was launched in June 2011 by Grid 21 in partnership with Texas-based utilities Oncor and CenterPoint Energy, as well as SDG&E in California. Grid 21 is a non-profit organization committed to engaging electricity customers in using a new generation of tools and technologies to better manage their electricity consumption.
SDG&E, the only utility to participate in the campaign in California, was able to leverage their investment in smart meters, to deliver more benefits and savings to consumers.
Simple Energy uses a social gaming platform to engage consumers in saving energy on the mobile and social web. It takes customers’ real-time energy data and normalizes it so they can compete fairly in improved energy savings.
