Engage study investigates whether power consumption monitors in residence halls lead students to use less electricity
By Kavitha Subramanian
April 29, 2011 2:15 a.m.
The wires, hidden behind white tape, were supposed to be inconspicuous.
Yet every time Sonia Izmirian walked in and out of her dorm room, she saw the wires taped to her walls and remembered to switch off the lights and turn off the air.
Izmirian was part of a pilot study to understand whether making energy consumption information available to students leads to a conscious decrease in energy consumption.
The pilot led to the full-scale Engage study, which began this fall. Researchers will continue recording how much energy each of the 66 participating rooms uses until the end of the school year.
Izmirian, who graduated last year with a degree in psychology, said she was shocked to see that 50 percent of her usage was just air conditioning.
The wires in her room led from the lights and air vents to a monitor, which was sandwiched neatly between a power strip and the wall outlet.
This monitor recorded every kilowatt of energy being used in her Rieber Terrace room in real time and showed Izmirian exactly what percentage came from what source.
In an age where science is continually exposing the impact of human activity on the environment, understanding how people respond to energy consumption data remains a priority.
“When you tell them about their electricity usage, are they going to change their behavior? Or do they need other motivations?” asked Magali Delmas, professor of management at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.
In the study, some of the residents had energy monitors but were not informed of their energy usage. Other residents were only able to see their own data. The rest, however, could also see their peers’ numbers as well.
Humans are “social animals,” and if one person sees that everyone else is doing one thing, he or she will be internally motivated to follow that social norm, Delmas said.
For some participants, however, charts on select floors publicly displayed which rooms had below average or above average energy consumption.
“When information becomes public, people begin to be more responsible,” Delmas said. “We care about what people think.”
Neil Lessem, an economics graduate student and project leader, agreed that this factor adds pressure.
“You can wear clothes that say organic all over them and be a vegetarian, but … you might be a total energy hog,” Lessem added. “Your energy consumption is completely invisible without the monitors.”
Victor Chen, an electrical engineering graduate student, developed the sensor from common materials with funding from the Associated Students UCLA Green Initiative Fund. The information is passed along through radios so that it can be accessed through the Internet.
“This was really designed as a social experiment,” Chen said. “But in order to do that, we needed the technology to monitor changes.”
Housing only claims 5 percent of UCLA’s total energy expenditure, most of which comes from the dining halls, said Robert Gilbert, sustainability manager for Housing and Hospitality Services.
“Even though it sounds like a small percent, it doesn’t mean it is an insignificant amount,” Gilbert said.
Since utilities are bundled with overall housing payments in the dorms, students do not feel the financial stress to conserve energy.
The problem of financial motivation will be addressed in the fall, when the study expands to a graduate student housing complex in which residents pay a monthly utility bill.
