Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: Competition is found in all societies, and it is found in many areas of society: for example, biology and ecology, economics, business, politics, sports, education, and lotteries.Not surprisingly, competition has become an increasingly popular strategy to engage individuals in energy and resource conservation; however, there has not been an objective, independent review of existing competition programs focusing on the reduction of energy use.This report attempts to address this shortcoming.This report reviews a representative selection of completed and ongoing energy reduction competitions and uses the lessons learned to provide best practice guidance on the design, implementation, and evaluation of future programs.We address four key research questions: Executive SummaryThis report reviews a representative selection of completed and ongoing energy reduction competitions and uses the lessons learned to provide best practice guidance on the design, implementation, and evaluation of future programs.We address four key research questions:• How effective have been competitions at changing behavior and reducing energy?• How long do energy savings persist after the end of the competition?• Under what circumstances are competitions more or less effective?• What are common best practices for the design, implementation and evaluation of energy and resource conservation competitions?This report is based on a literature review, in-depth interviews with designers, implementers and evaluators of 20 competitions, case studies and analysis.Results and recommendations in this report are organized by project type including: university residence halls, inter-community competitions, inter-community home energy upgrade programs, intra-community competitions, inter-organization competitions, intra-organization competitions and a national building energy competition.This review is not a meta-analysis of projects, and it does not seek to provide quantitative estimates of results.The methods do allow for in-depth observations based on input from program implementers and evaluators across a range of competitions.The primary target audiences for this report are electric and natural gas utilities seeking to broaden their portfolio of behavior-based interventions, as well as potential designers, implementers and evaluators of energy reduction competitions.Our intention is to improve the effectiveness of competitions and to suggest when competition may or may not be an effective strategy to save energy over the long term.Many of the lessons from this report should also be relevant to students, practitioners and policymakers seeking to engage individuals and groups in energy and resource conservation. SavingsBased on our review of the competitions in this report, we believe that competitions have been effective at changing behavior and reducing energy use, although we don't know how long the energy savings or practices (habits) will persist.Energy savings have not been measured in all of the programs, but where they have, it has been mainly electricity savings.In general, electricity savings from these programs have been around 5% during the program period, a strong result for behavior-based strategies.Some programs, however, have realized substantially higher savings.The Sustainable Connections' Community Energy Challenge has achieved 21% average savings in each year of its competition.In the first year of the CoolCalifornia Challenge, 14% electricity savings were achieved over five months of the year-long program for the roughly 1,000 most active participants entering energy data.And in the Campus Conservation Nationals, v the top 10% of participating buildings achieve over 30% savings.So, there is a potential for deep energy savings to occur, but most savings for most of the competitions were below 10%.For a few programs, CO 2 savings have been estimated, and some results have been substantial.For example, as the Campus Conservation Nationals has grown over time, CO 2 savings have also grown impressively: to over 3 million pounds by its fourth year.The Sustainable Connections' Community Energy Challenge has achieved almost 13 million pounds of CO 2 savings per year.And NEEA's Kilowatt Crackdown has resulted in 50 million pounds of CO 2 savings since 2007.For a few programs, financial savings have been estimated, ranging from a few thousand dollars to millions of dollars.For example, EPA's ENERGY STAR Building Competition believes that it has saved $70 million in the last two years of its national program, the Kansas Take Charge Challenge saved over $2 million, and Cool Choices saved about $430,000.It is important to note that the measurement and evaluation of these programs varied substantially.None of the programs used a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) where subjects are randomly assigned to treatment and control groups (Vine et al. 2014).Only a few programs conducted a quasi-experimental study, comparing energy impacts for participants and nonparticipants (CoolCalifornia Challenge and San Diego Energy Challenge).The majority of the programs that conducted evaluations simply compared energy use during the treatment period with energy use in a prior (pre-treatment) period (either monthly or annual energy use) -with no comparison group analysis.Sometimes, the estimated savings were weather normalized (e.g., Energy Smackdown and Community Energy Challenge), but often the savings were not weather normalized.Finally, several programs relied on energy models to calculate the savings, while others did not conduct any energy evaluations.Unfortunately, many of these competitions were of short duration (weeks or months), and none of the programs conducted a formal evaluation of persistence.We were only able to find some anecdotal information: the Campus Conservation Nationals program noted that savings were sustained 2-3 weeks after competition, and the Energy Smackdown program noted that participants reported doing the same behaviors six months or later (but not measured). Communication ChannelsThe competition programs used different channels to communicate with participants.All programs had websites, which were a central, or even primary means of communicating with participants.Almost all programs also used some form of e-mail communication with participants, in-person communication strategies, informational flyers or poster, events, newsletters and social media.While communication channels are instrumental in the competitions, the behavior change strategies appeared to be more critical in ensuring successful outcomes.vi ConclusionsFor competitions to be effective, it is imperative that resources are committed for the long term, so that a competition program can endure.By keeping a program stable in the community for several years, one is able to build critical relationships, trust and consistency in program delivery, leading to enhanced program credibility and program accomplishments.At the same time, resources need to be committed for the design and implementation of rigorous evaluations of competitions.As federal, regional, state and local governments and non-profits move towards aggressively pursuing energy savings, we expect that more energy reduction xi competitions will be needed to provide these additional energy resources.We hope that this report can stimulate more thinking about competitions as well as more funding for the design, implementation and evaluation of energy reduction competitions.xii
Authors: Vine Edward, Christopher M. Jones
Language: English
Subfield: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W222404196