Energy Schizophrenia: 21st Century Tech, 20th Century Mentality

In my last post I lamented ARPA-E’s total emphasis on hold-in-your-hand gadgetry, and the absence of research on less tangible energy innovation. Of course, in classic blogger tradition, I didn’t have a very clear idea of what that might involve — just some vague notions about alternatives to GDP and social experiments, whatever those are.

So I bounced the notion off my fellow Wired Science writer Alexis Madrigal, whose book on the history of green technology is coming out next year. He pointed me at Ryan Wise, an electricity market expert at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who in turn sent me to Ed Vine, an LBNL energy analyst. And Vine had a message: there’s indeed a great deal of non-tech-based energy research out there.

“We’ve traditionally focused more on the widgets,” said Vine. “But now the other side is getting more attention.”

Vine referred me to a study that came out in October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on the superficially unsexy subject of energy-consuming behaviors and how they can be changed. The researchers estimated that small, eminently achievable changes in everyday behavior — carpooling, sealing windows, and so on — could reduce U.S. carbon emissions by more than seven percent.

That might not sound like much, but it’s equivalent to the yearly emissions of France, or of the U.S. iron, steel and aluminum industries, with petroleum refinement thrown in to boot.

But there’s a catch: changes that seem simple, easy and obvious — carpooling is one great example — aren’t always adopted. Riding to work in the most convenient way possible isn’t a “plastic” behavior, in research parlance. Other decisions seem to be affected by psychological dynamics like those described earlier by Moises, in which performing some minor act of environmental decency makes us feel like we don’t need to do anything else.

Vine also guided me to a collection of white papers produced on behalf of the California Public Utilities Commission. Back during the 2001 energy crisis, when blackouts rolled across the Golden State and saving energy was imperative, the CPUC had the good sense to study what people were doing, and why. The papers are an example of the sort of behavioral research that needs to be conducted in tandem with the technological.

Some of the research is methodological, intended to find better ways of measuring the effects of changes to personal behaviors, as well as the motivations. The latter is both important — if you know why some people do better, maybe you can figure out why other people don’t, and how to convince them — and deceptively complicated.

“There are different energy-saving messages out there, and different programs. People are doing lots of different things for different reasons, and nobody’s been able to do a systematic study on what those reasons are,” said Vine. “Measuring how much energy people save is the easy part. But if there’s a reduction, then what caused it?”

CPUC-funded researchers are looking at behavioral trends in different demographic groups, and also at how models of individual behavior used to guide policy and program decisions need to be updated. Many of those models assume that people are “rational economic actors,” always using available information to make choices in their best interests. That assumption originated in the world of economics, where it’s been largely discredited; it’s not always be applicable to energy use, either.

Then there’s meta-level work on what sort of experiments should be run to test new types of energy efficiency, how to change the behaviors of administrators and policymakers, and so on.

It’s exciting stuff, and all this is just a piece of it. (For more, see this excellent Science feature package. It was published in August, and is probably the most comprehensive general-audience look at energy efficiency and behavior out there.) It also touches on some of what Sandra talks about in her last post: the real-world social and economic environment in which energy innovation takes place.

Sandra refers to Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who described the whole social-economic-technological system as following an essentially biological, evolutionary model. This type of interpretation is very tricky — more on that next week — but suffice it to say that “evolution” isn’t some magic process that always provides the best possible solution, much less what we want it to. It’s shaped by many parameters, many of them hidden or subtle or even counterproductive, depending on one’s perspective. In the case of energy innovation, human behavior is one of those parameters, and an important one.

To be fair, the U.S. Department of Energy seems to get this. In the Science article, energy chief Steven Chu says that energy efficiency “isn’t just low hanging fruit; it’s fruit lying on the ground.” The article’s author also notes that “the biggest challenge is not inventing new technology but persuading more people to adopt technology and practices that already exist.”

And as the California example makes clear — heck, as the incandescent light bulbs that are probably in your home make clear, and the way many offices are so air conditioned that workers wear sweaters in the summer, and how many of those workers crank up the heat at home in winter, rather than donning the sweaters they wear at work in the summer — we just don’t understand persuasion, even when it seems obvious. When it comes to energy behavior, we’re still clunking along in an age-of-carbon mentality. Behavioral research is just as exciting, and just as necessary, as any new solar panel or algae fuel.

Posted by Brandon Keim (Web/Twitter)

Image: Semaphoria