Did I think the most professionally fulfilling week of my life would be after being locked away in a too-small conference room with just a sliver of a window in the middle of a cold snap in December? No. Was it? Yes.
“Hey Alexa, how many people have invited voice-based personal assistants into their homes?” The answer: millions and counting.
Behavior change is difficult in any context. As the late English writer Samuel Johnson once said, “The chains of habit are too weak to be felt, until they are too strong to be broken.”
We all harbor some degree of resistance to changing habits. It is common to become so familiar with a routine that it becomes a source of comfort. That’s why becoming more energy efficient, though appealing on paper, is a much more strenuous effort than it initially seems.
Changing habits and behavior is best achieved through support, reminders, incentives, community pressure, goal setting, and more. Finding a successful strategy is critical to behavior change, but this process is often challenging. Enter the new ACEEE report “Reducing Energy Waste through Municipally Led Behavior Change Programs,” which established a sequence of seven steps for local governments to shape viable municipally led behavior change programs. Let’s break these steps down and explore how they work.
On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous I Have a Dream speech in Washington D.C., exclaiming, “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity. But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.” Today, some fifty-six years later in 2020, one may ask, what does this have to do with me? The answer is this: It has everything to do with each one of us as some still lack freedoms in various ways today. What do I mean?
Home energy assessments offer a rare opportunity for energy efficiency programs:face-to-face, individual attention from consumers who are motivated to make a change. This is one of the few times utilities are able to hear a homeowner’s specific concerns and offer unique, tailored energy efficiency upgrade options.
