The Power Games: Using Game Apps to Conserve Energy

“After about a week or two [of using the pro­gram], I could fig­ure out which appli­ances were using how much energy and kind of plan accord­ingly after that,” said Faunce.

Welcome to our gam­i­fied future: where energy effi­ciency com­petes with Foursquare and Angry Birds for your atten­tion. Winning brings badges and high scores, but it also trans­lates into money saved for the con­sumer and a smarter grid for everyone.

The Faunces got the dis­play last year when they entered a pro­gram hosted by San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) to encour­age peo­ple to cut down on energy con­sump­tion. The util­ity part­nered with Boulder, Colo.-based startup Simple Energy to moti­vate res­i­dents by mak­ing a com­pet­i­tive game out of it, com­plete with prizes.

“You could tell what posi­tion you were in rel­a­tive to every­one else—you could deter­mine if you were going to catch them and pass them,” said Faunce.

Simple Energy devel­ops web­sites and apps that allow con­sumers to track their energy usage in real time and com­pete with each other (or them­selves) to reduce it. The con­test the Faunces won, Biggest Energy Saver, was actu­ally a pilot pro­gram in San Diego that proved social gam­ing appli­ca­tions can help con­sumers earn an aver­age energy sav­ings of 20 percent—up to 50 per­cent for top users.

But the energy and cost sav­ings didn’t end when the com­pe­ti­tion did. “People thought we were going to revert back, but we’re actu­ally sav­ing more and more as time goes on,” Faunce said.

Here’s an over­sim­pli­fied descrip­tion of how it works: Simple Energy gets con­sumer usage data from elec­tric util­i­ties and fun­nels that through its servers into the mobile and desk­top pro­grams it designs. All you need is a com­puter or smart­phone: Once you sign up, your online account or mobile phone app can tell you how much energy you’ve used in the last hour, day, month, etc.

“You don’t actu­ally have to do anything—other than save energy,” said Simple Energy co-founder and CEO Yoav Lurie. “Even if you never come back, you’re still playing.”

If your friends join, you can mon­i­tor how you’ve per­formed against them, too. If you’re using less energy, you’ll score more points and beat them out. As a reward, you can earn badges (a la Foursquare) for reach­ing cer­tain bench­marks or demon­strat­ing feats of energy-saving skill: How often can you halve your energy use? For how many days in a row?

Lurie thinks the con­cept is a no-brainer. He points to peo­ple strug­gling to stay healthy: We all know what health-positive habits are good for us, but does every­one get enough exer­cise and eat right all the time? Both research and anec­do­tal evi­dence back up the idea that competition—be it a points sys­tem to con­trol your eat­ing habits or find­ing a work­out buddy—make long-term health goals eas­ier to attain. It’s the same with energy effi­ciency: A lot of peo­ple think it’s a good idea to save more energy, it’s just incon­ve­nient or a has­sle to do so.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Grist.org.