NEWCOMERS: Success of interventions to stimulate conservation behaviour and load shifting in new clean energy communities

Clean energy communities aim to promote renewable energy as well as energy efficiency (Gui and MacGill, 2018; Mlinarič et al., 2019). They are social networks that could create a new social identity among their members, enable social learning about energy conservation and create collective efficacy beliefs. These factors could thereby lead to new environmentally friendly behaviours among energy community members. Initial qualitative evidence suggests that involvement in energy communities may indeed encourage sustainable energy behaviours (Andor et al., 2022; Biddau et al., 2016; Middlemiss, 2011). In this report, we investigate whether energy communities can (i) increase the impact of behavioural interventions to reduce energy consumption and (ii) change energy consumption patterns in private households. Specifically, we conducted two field experiments in a virtual energy saving community founded by GEN-I, the largest Slovenian electricity utility. The experiments took place subsequent to the rollout of this newly created GEN-I Energy Community, the effect of which on overall electricity use is analysed in Deliverable 5.1 (Andor et al., 2021). The GEN-I Energy Community consisted of 150 exogenously selected GEN-I customers that were interconnected via an online platform. They were enabled and encouraged to communicate with each other via the platform where they also received energy saving tips, detailed information about their own and the community’s energy consumption and were encouraged to find ways to save energy together as a group. A control group of 150 additional customers, selected according to the same procedure as the members of the energy community, got access to a similar platform, which did not contain the specific community-related features that the energy community had. For example, there was no possibility to communicate, no group-level information, and no community framing. Thus, the isolated effect of the energy community can be identified through the comparison of the treatment group, the GEN-I Energy Community, and the control group. Besides these 300 core study participants, we also obtained electricity consumption data from more than 700 further GEN-I customers. We do not consider these customers as core study participants, as we did not further interact with them during the study and solely analyse their electricity consumption data as additional control group data in parts of the analyses. In the first experiment, we investigate whether the effect of real-time feedback while showering is enhanced by membership in the GEN-I Energy Community. Showering is a highly relevant subject of study, as it is an everyday activity that involves high energy consumption due to the need to heat up large amounts of water. Real-time feedback is a behavioural intervention that is, in the context of our experiment, provided by shower heads that are able to indicate the water use while showering via coloured LED lights. The results provide evidence that real-time feedback is highly effective in reducing water and energy use while showering. Our results thus confirm previous findings (for example Tiefenbeck et al., 2018) and extend them, among others, by demonstrating this effectiveness for the first time in an Eastern European country, thus contributing to the knowledge on the generalisability of the effects. Yet, we do not find differential treatment effects across energy community members compared to other study participants. In the second experiment, we examine whether membership in the GEN-I Energy Community results in community members responding better to an incentivised group-level goal to reduce peak electricity consumption than those who were not part of the community. All 300 core study participants were challenged to reduce their peak-time electricity consumption (between 5:00 pm and 9:00 pm) by 10 per cent for one month. If the goal was met in the group average, GEN-I pledged to make a donation for each study participant or energy community member to a charity chosen by the participants themselves by vote on the virtual platform. The goal had to be achieved collectively rather than individually. Thus, for energy community members, the goal was described as a goal of the energy community, while for the other study participants, it was described as a goal for all participants in the study. The results indicate that the energy community group was able to reduce its electricity use in peak hours on average by 4 per cent, while the other study participants did not reach a comparable reduction. Deeper analysis shows that this effect is mainly driven by the half of the energy community that previously experienced real-time feedback and still did during the challenge. This group reduced its electricity use in peak hours on average by 7.2 per cent, while none of the other groups exhibited a comparable reduction. This suggests that the experience of real-time feedback and membership in the energy community combined lead to these participants also being willing to change their electricity consumption behaviour over the course of the day