Photo by Allan Ajifo, via Flickr.

Within the energy business, everyone is always looking for the next big thing. Often, that’s a new piece of technology, a new form of energy, or the most recent bit of analysis. salesforce service cloud . Those are all well and good, but what if the most significant factor when it comes to saving energy was inside all of us?

That’s exactly what this in-depth story from The Washington Post’s Chris Mooney posits. To wit, Mooney argues that the most productive way to save energy is to change people, “their habits, routines, practices, and preconceptions.”

Mooney cites numerous ways in which behavioral changes could be profound for America’s energy economy, from the military (eliminating the notion that vehicles should always be idling), to the home (fighting back against incorrect assumptions, like the false notion that it takes more energy to reheat your house in the morning if the thermostat is lowered at night).

Among the most powerful examples in the piece are published figures of possible/ballpark energy savings from behavioral changes:

• “A roughly 1 percent overall U.S. household energy savings could be gained if people switched their washing machines from “hot wash, warm rinse” to “warm wash, cold rinse.”
• A 8 percent gain could come from setting the thermostat at 68 degrees during the day and 65 degrees overnight.
• Another 2 percent could be gained by driving cars at 60 miles per hour, rather than 70, on the highway.”

Much like the studies and organizations in Moody’s piece, McKinstry’s powerED program also focuses on behavior. Specifically, powerED is designed to heighten energy awareness and operational efficiency among the occupants of a facility through active participation, careful resource tracking, and performance goals. Happily, many of McKinstry’s powerED clients have reaped the benefits of behavioral improvements and discovered the inherent power in changing their energy usage patterns and preconceptions.

Mooney’s article shows how behavior-based shifts have moved the needle for the Department of Defense—the single-biggest user of energy in the U.S. If an organization which uses “roughly the same amount of power annually as the state of West Virginia” can instill such changes, we at McKinstry think that bodes well for the next “energy revolution.”

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