Dimensions of Energy Behavior: A ToolKit for Assessing Behavior-Based Energy Interventions

Southern California Edison will be presented with more and more ideas for program offerings that are styled as "behavioral" offerings; however, whether these offerings do have an effect on energy savings behaviors is unknown. This standardized scale will allow SCE to assess the relative effectiveness of offerings with behavioral components by tracking changes in the scale. This will help understand which behavioral offerings are more effective overall, as well as to understand which behavioral offerings might be better for a particular customer segment. The lack of a standardized scale has made it difficult to make such comparisons in the past. Use of the scale will help utilities make objective assessments of the claims by behavioral-offering developers. Ultimately, any behavioral program will need to describe its effect on customer behavior. To this end, a standardized tool is necessary to objectively assess effects on behavior. A standardized scale of behavioral effects gives the utilities some metric against which to assess the behavior change claims of third-party developers and implementers. Currently there is no objective standard by which to make these decisions.