Providing households with insights into their energy use can motivate them to adopt energy-saving behaviors. A new paper highlights how utilities can strengthen their home energy report programs and adopt new approaches to maximize their benefits.
If you are a customer of a large utility, you may periodically receive personalized reports that compare your energy use to that of similar nearby homes and provide tips to reduce your bills. These home energy reports draw from behavioral science to encourage millions of households every year to save energy through small habit changes and larger home improvements.
Read the Report Home energy reports still work. Two decades in, a new ACEEE paper finds these programs continue to deliver meaningful savings and other benefits. It details how they can be updated and broadened to spur greater impact, including maximizing grid capacity savings, emissions reductions, and support for low-income households.
Register for the report release webinar today, May 21, at 2:30pm ET
Equipped with home energy reports, households act
Our review of program evaluations and meta-analyses spanning from 2016 to 2025 found that home energy reports change household behavior at roughly the same rate today as when they were first introduced. Evaluations published in 2023 and 2024 showed average electricity savings for all customers who receive the reports ranging from 0.31% to 2.29% per household and gas savings ranging from 0.11% to 1.4% per household, adding up to significant reductions in energy use on the electric grid.
Long-running studies confirm that utility customers randomly assigned to receive the reports save more energy than those randomly assigned not to receive them, even after many years of receiving them. Savings increase over the first two years as customers develop energy-saving behaviors, then continue for as long as customers receive the reports.
Regulators can take steps to increase the programs’ impact
To make home energy report programs more impactful, we recommend that utility regulators use the following strategies:
- Revise how the programs are evaluated so that home energy report programs are encouraged to channel customers to other utility programs and not penalized if that results in increased electricity consumption from home electrification or bill assistance programs.
- Require the evaluation of peak savings alongside overall savings. Shifting household energy use away from peak times reduces grid strain and climate pollution.
- Approve the programs for as long as they remain cost-effective, both to capture their full savings potential following the initial ramp-up and to retain the unique benefits that come from a program capable of reaching large percentages of total customers, including those that are otherwise hard to serve.
- Ensure performance payments tied to the programs are neither too high nor too low. Utilities should be incentivized to deliver a balanced efficiency portfolio that includes both behavior-based programs and home upgrade programs.
- Require programs to channel eligible customers to low-income programs. This will help alleviate energy burdens for some of those customers.
- Encourage utilities to pilot emerging strategies to tweak or build on traditional home energy reports.
Utilities can experiment with new ways of motivating behavior change
Home energy reports are just one type of behavior-based energy efficiency program. Some utilities have begun building on their home energy report efforts by deploying additional programs that can also help meet their goals. These include using behavioral science-informed messages during peak heat events to encourage reduced energy consumption, notifying customers when their bill is likely to be higher than expected at the end of the month, and offering phone apps that provide real-time, granular feedback on home energy use. In addition, our paper describes several opportunities for behavior-based efficiency, including the potential to gamify home energy use and promote efficiency through school-based programs.
Home energy reports are a proven foundation. The question now is whether utilities and regulators will build on them.
