Lisa Schmidt from HEA talks about a free program to lower energy bills for PG&E customers in California. Californians end up saving on energy bills with help from professionals free of charge. Lisa’s program, HomeIntel, is one of the P4P pilots that focus on lowering bills without needing to spend much upfront. HomeIntel focuses on “easy savings” with no purchases or $20-25 devices.

This is part 2 of our interview with Lisa. Go back to part 1 to learn about what “pay for performance” is and how free energy coaching came to be. This section talks about how energy coaching works. Fyi, the California Energy Commission (CEC) supported HEA and volunteers to put together this educational website.

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TRAVIS:  HomeIntel is one of these energy savings programs?

LISA SCHMIDT:  Yes.

TRAVIS:  Can you tell us a bit about HomeIntel?

LISA SCHMIDT:  Yeah, I’d be happy to. So I’d mentioned before that we had developed a web application called Smart Audit. And it’s being used now in HomeIntel, our Pay for Performance program.

LISA SCHMIDT:  Smart Audit had been used in other programs before, but now we’ve combined Smart Audit with a personal energy coach that can help a customer once they signed in. Their energy coach reaches out to them and says, “Can I provide you with some extra support so that we can reduce your energy use, or do you want help taking the first steps?” People can decide what level of engagement they prefer. Self-service all the way to in-person visit.

LISA SCHMIDT:  Some participants in our HomeIntel program never use energy coach. They go through our online system, get enough information, start tracking their energy use, and they’re satisfied. Some people would prefer the energy coach come to their home and look at it and help them on site. We can support that too for certain circumstances. HomeIntel combines Smart Audit with an energy coach. The customer’s interaction with the energy coach is driven by what the customer wants to do and what the possibilities are.

TRAVIS:  How much do people have to pay for this service for a coach to come to their home and/or use this online software?

LISA SCHMIDT:  They don’t have to pay anything, and that’s because HEA is paid by PG&E to deliver energy savings. So, we have lots of incentive to help a customer save energy because the more energy we can help them save, the more we’re paid by PG&E.

LISA SCHMIDT:  And we have a lot of incentive to help the customer save energy at the lowest impact to the customer. We want to make it very easy. We don’t want it to eat into their lives or their budget by doing things that would be uncomfortable or difficult, because then they might not want to save, and we wouldn’t get paid. So we want to make it as easy for our customers as possible because then it’s easier for us. It really is lining up the incentives–the same for both us, the utility company and the customer. We all want to get savings as inexpensively and easy as possible.

TRAVIS:  Can you share some ways that people are saving without discomfort or pain you’re talking about?

LISA SCHMIDT:  Yeah. A lot of people think that to make a difference in their home, they have to go through a remodel, or they have to set the thermostat in an uncomfortable level. It turns out that most of the energy wastes, especially here in the California coastal area, is due to all sorts of other things. It’s not due to the performance of your home. It’s due to things inside your home that are going on and off or maybe they’ve been left on for a really long time.

LISA SCHMIDT:  As some examples of strange things that we found that people weren’t aware of that really helps save energy .. we’ve run into situations where the timer on the pool pump at the house had broken, and the pool pump was on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Pool pumps use a whole lot of energy, and no one recommends that they run 24 hours a day.

LISA SCHMIDT:  People didn’t recognize that this was happening. They didn’t recognize how much energy it was using. Fix the pool pump timer, and you save a big chunk of energy. People just weren’t aware, but we could tell by looking at our analysis that something big is going on all the time so we helped them find it.

LISA SCHMIDT:  Some other good examples include a family who had used in their basement or crawl space a dehumidifier/fan in the winter to help keep the air moving and keep it from getting stagnant. And then every year, it was set to go off after the rainy season and stay off until next year. Well, it had been left on. Or the timer was broken, so it stayed on all the time. They didn’t realize that. But when we looked at their energy usage charts, we could see something like that was happening. Again, no impact to their lifestyle but saved a big chunk of energy. Most importantly, it was very easy to fix.

LISA SCHMIDT:  A lot of the problems we find are things that have been left on that people don’t realize. And they’re big things that use a lot of energy like radiant floors that people think are turned off but are not or hot water recirculation pumps that are pushing hot water around the house all the time that use a whole lot of energy and don’t need to be there.

LISA SCHMIDT:  These are examples of things that really don’t affect somebody’s life. They don’t require money to fix. It’s more a matter of people recognizing how much energy these sorts of appliances or conditions are wasting.

TRAVIS:  Does that happen pretty often? Is that where most of the savings are coming from for people?

LISA SCHMIDT:  Yeah, especially in very high energy use homes. It’s generally not your refrigerator or the dishwasher. It’s all the other things. If you went around your home and counted all the devices that were plugged in, you would be amazed at how many there are. And you would be amazed at how many are using energy even when you think they’re off. And if you start digging into that a little bit, you can find ways to save energy that, like I said, don’t impact your lifestyle. These situations don’t cost money to save and are pretty straightforward to fix once you recognize where the opportunities are.

TRAVIS:  When someone signs up for HomeIntel, how do you begin to look for these things?

LISA SCHMIDT:  Well, the first thing we do is we ask them to use Smart Audit. What happens is then we download all their utility data. In HomeIntel’s case, that’s usually from PG&E. And we do some analysis in the background on that data, and break it into energy use categories and display that to the customer. We teach them about how those energy use categories interact and what they represent. So, people can use Smart Audit as more of an educational tool. We really don’t ask for much right upfront, just a handful of questions.

LISA SCHMIDT:  And then the customer will spend time learning about energy use in their home, looking at what categories of their energy use falls into and how it changes over time. Once they make it through that step, we start giving them some hints about how to save energy in specific categories. The customer can say, “Okay, I’d really like some help from a coach,” and they can reach out to their coach and start discussing the best way to proceed from that point.

TRAVIS:  Is it hard to download this data? You talked about downloading data from PG&E or whatever utility company a Californian resident is with?

LISA SCHMIDT:  No. from the customer’s point of view, it’s very easy. It’s a matter of clicking a button and saying, “Yes, I give HEA can access my energy data for this purpose.” So, the customer fortunately doesn’t have to deal with the data. All they do is say, “Yes, HEA have access to it.” We do all that download and computation for them. Our users just get the results.

TRAVIS:  Okay. How has it been working?

LISA SCHMIDT:  Well, we’ve been able to deliver really good energy savings. We’re very, very pleased with that. One way to measure the effectiveness of programs is to work with the State of California and the utility companies to evaluate how much actual energy savings a program has delivered.

LISA SCHMIDT:  If a program gets 2 to 5% energy savings, that’s considered a pretty good deal. We’re seeing, according to PG&E’s calculations, 10% energy savings for electricity and 12% for natural gas. This is really spectacularly better than any other program that’s out there especially when you take into account how little it actually costs for the customer. Our results have been really impressive.

TRAVIS:  PG&E should be quite happy. I was just talking to James who worked at PG&E in the Customer Energy Solutions department. It seemed like he was so excited about it that he left PG&E and joined HomeIntel.

LISA SCHMIDT:  Well, I think he was going to leave PG&E anyway, but I’m really, really glad he joined HomeIntel, joining us in our efforts because he knows so much about the ins and outs of the different programs that PG&E had.

TRAVIS:  I think some people think, “Oh, I have to install this? I have to get a bunch of guys to come over to install a bunch of solar panels or change out all these windows in my home.”

LISA SCHMIDT:  Exactly. I mean if you want to go through those lengths, it’s not a bad thing, but it’s just not a cost-effective way to reduce energy consumption.

TRAVIS:  For most of users of HomeIntel, how much would you say they would have to spend to start saving this 10% to 12% per month that you’re talking about?

LISA SCHMIDT:  I think, frequently, they don’t spend anything. Some things that we might suggest people invest in are smart strips which are $20 to $25 a piece from Amazon. Those can help if you have an entertainment system that has several components like surround-sound and game consoles. You would like to be able to turn all those off completely when you’re not using this. So smart strip can help in that.

LISA SCHMIDT:  Or maybe you have a computer system at home that has printers and other peripherals. So, that’s a $20-sort of investment for a smart strip for an office setup. You may have other devices you want to put on a timer. Again, a $15 or $20 investment.

LISA SCHMIDT:  Most of the time, we don’t have people invest in very expensive items. We will occasionally run into homes that have a lot of energy-intensive lighting. In those cases, we might suggest people invest in LEDs, but again, we’re talking much less money than people imagined to perform a retrofit on their home. It’s just not even in the same ball park.

Continue reading part 3 about the future of energy efficiency, net-zero homes, the smart grid and how it all ties together with climate change.