The nation’s electric utilities are taking to Facebook and Twitter, urging customers to conserve energy in the hopes of avoiding blackouts and other strains on the system, reports Diane Cardwell in Tuesday’s New York Times. It’s part of a broader push by the companies to use social media, competitive games and Big Brotherish data analysis to persuade customers to conserve.
While it seems counterintuitive for utilities to discourage use of their product, it makes financial sense as they face government mandates to encourage more energy conservation and deal with the rising cost and difficulty of building power plants and distribution systems.
For example, Duke Energy, the country’s largest utility after its merger with Progress Energy, is promoting a series of Web videos featuring a fictitious girl named Shannon who appears with her family, the Powers, to dispense energy-saving advice.
Opower, a leading home energy management company, is sending people reports on how their electricity use compares with households in their neighborhoods — complete with a smiley face, or two, depending on how they stack up. The company has created an app with Facebook and the Natural Resources Defense Council that can load a user’s energy data and allow people to compete with their friends and family.
The success of these programs remains to be seen. Most customers become interested in their electricity only when it doesn’t work, executives and experts say. The Duke Youtility page on Facebook, for instance, has fewer than 3,300 “likes,” and most of the recent comments complain about power failures, rate increases and the company’s troubled merger with Progress Energy.
But utilities hope to tap into the same dynamic that works for video games and applications like Foursquare, where users compete against one another to earn bragging rights, like becoming “mayor” of a favorite restaurant.
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