Tracking Your Way to Energy Savings

Many utilities across the country, including a few in Oregon, have finished installing new smart meters on customer homes and businesses within their respective service territories. For those of you who may not know, smart meters allow for two-way communication between the meter and the utility through a secure network. This means that if you’re a customer of a utility that’s utilizing smart meters, your meter is read every few minutes rather than once a month (or longer) as with the previous analog meters.

Why should we care? Well, some utilities and other organizations are doing something really cool with the information received from the smart meters: helping customers to be aware of their energy usage and identifying opportunities to improve each residence’s energy efficiency. This is great because it can help to save customers money, which is something that CUB always favors!

PGE’s Energy Tracker Tool: PGE’s new “Energy Tracker” tool is now available for PGE customers once they log-in to their account online. Much like many of the other tools you’ll read about below, it’s important to take the time to update your profile, which includes answering specific questions about your home (including its size, appliances, heating and cooling fuel sources, etc.) in order to get the most accurate information for how your home uses electricity. Once the user has entered information about their home, there are three general parts to the Energy Tracker tool: “Your energy use,” “Ways to save,” and “Analyze your bill.” The “Your energy use” function provides customers with detailed information about their own energy usage, including hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly usage data. Once you’ve updated your profile, the “Ways to save” function can also use customer-specific information to help customers identify ways to save based on their desired level of involvement, which can range from one simple change to extensive energy efficiency improvements. The “Analyze your bill” function may help customers to understand changes in their PGE bills. “Analyze Your Bill” helps customers to compare their usage to other time periods and highlights changes that may have caused either the increase or decrease in electric bills from previous months. Once Energy Tracker has accumulated a year’s worth of data for your home, you will also be able to compare a particular month to the same month in the previous year.

CUB Illinois’ CUB Energy Saver: Not to be confused with your very own Oregon CUB, Illinois CUB (an organization much like yours truly that serves ratepayers in Illinois) has developed its very own energy tracking tool called “CUB Energy Saver.” CUB Energy Tracker first asks the user to provide their ComEd account number, which allows the tool to sync the consumer’s energy usage online—can’t get much easier than that! Once the usage information is uploaded, the user can then enter information about their home to learn more about how his or her home uses electricity. The tool also allows the user to explore ways to save that range from no-cost improvements to significant home investments in energy efficiency measures. The tool also allows users to track their progress and shows estimated dollars saved. But one of the coolest aspects to the tool (in my opinion) is the “Rewards” feature, which rewards users for energy that they save—for every kWh saved, CUB Illinois gives the user 2 rewards points that can be used to redeem all kinds of discounts at various local and national businesses. Not only can you save money on your monthly bill, you can actually earn extra perks! Not too shabby.

Idaho Power’s Home Energy Yardstick: Idaho Power’s “Home Energy Yardstick” is a tool to help Idaho Power’s customers conserve energy and save money. As an initial measure, Idaho Power customers should answer the Home Profile question, which then provides energy saving ideas that may work to save the user money, if implemented. Once those questions are answered, the user can then enter his or her account information into the Home Energy Yardstick tool, which provides a breakdown of that user’s specific usage information that Idaho Power gathers from that user’s smart meter. There are graphs and charts to allow users to see their daily kWh usage, which can then be compared to previous months. Users can also see the average usage of their home and compare it to similar homes in their area. The tool also contains tons of tips and tricks that can save consumers energy by promoting energy efficiency.

Opower’s Home Energy Reports and Online Tools: Opower is a company that works with utilities to provide tools that help customers of participating utilities track their energy usage and save money. Opower’s Home Energy Reports deliver personalized information to users about their specific energy usage, which include graphs and data to compare usage to similar users. The reports also provide tips that can lead to energy savings. Opower also offers a variety of Online Tools that participating utilities may choose to make available to their customers—these will vary by participating utility. Finally, Opower’s Energy Alerts Platform is a unique (and pretty awesome) tool that alerts customers of participating utilities via text or e-mail about their usage (including a High Bill Alert that gives consumers a heads up that their bill is climbing so that they can try to curb usage), weather conditions that may impact energy usage, and more. This helps consumers to be ahead of their bills and to make changes during the month that may head off a high bill, rather than providing information at the end of the month after it’s too late.

If the tools discussed above aren’t available to you, but you’re interested in tracking your energy usage and looking for ways to save, we’d recommend that you consider checking out ENERGY STAR’s energy tracker tool, called “Home Energy Yardstick”. This tool is more limited because it’s not tied to the consumer’s actual usage via smart meter data, but it still allows the user to compare his or her home’s energy efficiency to similar homes across the country. To get started with this tool, you’ll need your energy use and costs for the last year (available on your past 12 utility bills or a summary bill you may be able to request from the utility), the energy sources for your home (natural gas, electricity, fuel oil, propane, etc.), and the square footage of your home. Users can then use the “Home Energy Advisor” tool to get recommendations for energy efficiency measures for typical homes in their areas.

All in all, energy tracking tools are a great way to be aware of energy usage and help to identify ways to conserve. CUB encourages those who have access to energy tracking tools to give them a try. Remember, the tool is only as good as you make it, so be sure to update your profile and look for trends in your usage and tips that may help you to save money. Happy tracking!

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