A recent study by MIT's Senseable City Lab explored ways to help households reduce energy costs. The research, conducted in Amsterdam, focused on energy coaching and technology to address energy poverty, which affects people who spend a large part of their income on energy bills, as reported by MIT News.
Joseph Llewellyn, a researcher at MIT's Senseable City Lab, said, "Our energy coaching project as a whole showed a 75 percent success rate at alleviating energy poverty." The study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, focused on households in Amsterdam facing energy poverty. One group received a report and coaching on energy savings, while another group also used smart devices for real-time data. As a result, participants reduced their electricity use by 33%, gas use by 42%, and energy bills by 53%. The share of income spent on energy dropped from 10.1% to 5.3%, helping three-quarters of the participants move out of energy poverty, according to MIT News.
Behavioral changes like heating only used rooms and unplugging idle devices helped reduce energy consumption, with energy coaching improving residents' understanding. "The range of energy literacy was quite wide from one home to the next," said Llewellyn. While families initially engaged with smart devices to track energy use, their involvement dropped over time, but the short-term monitoring led to lasting changes. Llewellyn is also working on retrofitting homes in Amsterdam to improve energy efficiency without increasing rent, as "We don’t want a household to save money on their energy bills if it also means the rent increases, because then we’ve just displaced expenses from one item to another." These efforts aim to cut costs and conserve resources, as stated by MIT News.
