Community Corner

ComEd App Lets Customers Get Social About Energy Use

Application drives friendly competition and raises awareness about energy consumption.

ComEd customers now have the ability to share and compare their energy use with friends on Facebook with a social energy app. Designed to provide customers with a better sense of their energy usage while fostering friendly competition, the app offers new ways to discover savings opportunities.

The app also provides customers a new place to connect and share information about the energy they use and the experiences they’ve had while saving energy and money. To get started, ComEd customers should visit social.opower.com and connect their utility usage data.

Customers who sign up will immediately start to see how their energy use compares to others, providing context for how efficient their home is versus other similar ones. As friends are invited and join in, people will then be able to compete against each other in savings competitions. Organizations also are invited to establish pages to rally their memberships with group challenges.

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The social energy app is the result of a partnership between Opower, Facebook and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) that is being offered by ComEd as a new way for customers to get further engaged in their energy use and cut unnecessary energy costs.

Millions of homes across the U.S. today can choose to connect their utility usage data with the app and start participating.

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“Technology has an important role to play in enabling customers to be more informed consumers,” said Val Jensen, senior vice president, Customer Operations. ComEd. “This app is just another example of a host of emerging tools to help our customers better manage their energy usage.”

The initial set of features in the app will enable customers to:

  • Compare Energy Use to Similar Homes: Customers are able to benchmark their home energy use against a national database of millions of homes. All benchmarking will be done on an aggregate level, ensuring complete data privacy.
  • Compare Energy Use Among Friends: Customers are able to invite friends to compare their energy use against their own, show how efficiently they use energy and share tips on how to improve.
  • Publish Conversations About Energy to the Facebook Newsfeed: Customers are able to share information about their energy use, compare how they rank against other group participants and tips.
  • Develop Affinity Groups: Communities of people are able to form teams to help each other achieve collective goals, as well as compete against other groups.  
  • Automatically Import Energy Data: ComEd customers are able to import their energy data into the application automatically, if they so choose.

According to the NRDC, improvements in energy efficiency have the potential to deliver more than $700 billion in cost savings in the U.S. alone. Understanding how people consume energy and their behavior around managing their use is critical to capturing this unlocked energy efficiency potential. Motivating consumers to take action — a longstanding challenge — is the key to unlocking this potential.


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