Effectiveness of Innovative Intervention—Household Energy Saving Option (HESO) on Promoting Energy Conservation in Residential Buildings

Conventional household energy saving strategies, such as energy efficient investments, monetary rewards and social media campaigns, are usually costly and time-consuming, which imposes huge fiscal burden for government to implement these strategies. Hence, a more cost-efficient incentive on building energy conservation is critical to release these burdens while achieving energy saving goals. In the review of prior literature on different kinds of building energy incentives, this study proposed a hybrid intervention—Household Energy Saving Option (HESO) aiming to encourage households reduce energy usage with minimum cost and satisfying effects. A sample size of 189 households across different regions in Singapore were recruited and among them, 45 were assigned to experiment group, in which participants were offered an option that either wining rewards by achieving home energy saving goals or losing their initial joining fees as punishment. After two rounds of experiment with various energy saving goals, results showed that in the first round, treatment group achieved average energy reduction of 11.2% when setting energy saving target of 5%; and achieved 14.1% in second round when setting a higher energy saving goal of 10%; while control group did not show any changes in energy consumption. However, the effect of HESO on home energy saving decayed along time after the intervention, which indicates that this intervention is better to be conducted in a series form. Taken together, these results demonstrate that HESO can produce significant reduction in home energy consumption. The contribution of this study is to develop an innovative and cost-efficient incentive for home energy conservation and to exam the interaction between household energy reduction and households’ demographics.