Smart meters and energy savings in Italy: Determining the effectiveness of persuasive communication in dwellings

To secure a sustainable energy development in the residential sector, attitudes and human behavior need to be modified toward more efficient and conscious energy usage. The goal of this research is to assess evaluations and to test the effectiveness in reducing domestic electricity consumption. The aim of the smart monitoring system we evaluate is to provide households with a user-friendly tool that improves awareness of energy behavior in homes, enabling better management via the visualization of consumption and persuasive tailored information on domestic electricity use. In our study, the system was tested on 31 Italian families selected among volunteers all over Italy, participating to the first trial phase from October 2012 to November 2013. A combination of persuasive communication strategies such as graphical real-time and historical feedback based on real data and comparison tools to encourage competitiveness against “similar” households were provided to users through a domestic user-friendly interface. In addition, personalized energy saving prompts were sent via web-newsletters to trial users. The study concludes that energy related persuasive communication is effective in reducing electricity consumption in dwellings on average −18% and up to −57%.