Human brains are wired to enjoy the challenges, positive feedback, and social bonding that games provide. In recent years, utilities have been exploring the use of games to motivate people to save energy. In 2014, Con Edison worked with Cornell University and ThinkEco to use gamification to promote residential demand response. The pilot offered customers with room air conditioners a way to entered into a raffle with multiple reward tiers based on load reduction. Results from the pilot revealed raffle-based incentives improved upon the traditional fixed-rebate incentives by increasing the average demand reduction, all while reducing the overall incentives payment.

1. Gamification of Residential
Demand Response
Vicki Kuo
Section Manager, Customer Technology
Con Edison
October 24, 2015
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2. Agenda
• Lets talk Games!
• Challenges for Con Edison residential demand response
programs
• Gamification project concept
• Findings
• Q&A
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3. Gaming Statistics
• Gaming is a $22.4 billion dollar industry.
• 44% of gamers are female. Most frequent female
gamer is on average 43 years old.
• 35% of the people surveyed use their
smartphone for gaming.
• Gamers play an average of 6.5 hours a week.
http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ESA-Essential-Facts-2015.pdf

4. Why do we like games?
• Studies have shown gaming to be an
effective way to engage participants
in a reward system.
• Research have shown gamers to
have higher level of dopamine
release in the brain than non-
gamers.
• Dopamine is associated with
happiness and euphoria.
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/brain/video-games#.UcmtcjvVB68

5. Load(MW)
Hours
3,111
4,001
5,001
6,001
7,001
8,001
9,001
10,001
11,001
12,001
4,000
5,000
6,000
7,000
8,000
9,000
10,000
11,000
12,000
12,836
25
817
1,704
2,094
2,482
707
468
330
134
23
Load Range (MW) Number of Hours
8,784 Hours - Leap Year
What is Demand Response?
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23 hours (or 0.3% of the
year) comprised the top
800 MW

6. Managing Summer Peak Demand
• Over 6 million room AC on
Con Edison’s system
• Unit capacity 500 - 2000 W
• Represents ~2,500 MW of
load
• ~20% of summer time load

7. 7
Customer
View and control
remotely
via Internet
CoolNYC Program

8. CoolNYC Challenges
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• Device connection rates
• Event participation duration (opt-out time)
• Cost effectiveness
– Incentive payout
– Mobility of room AC population

9. $0.10
for sure
$100 with a
1 in 10,000
chance
Question
• Do you want….
A B

10. Raffle Incentive Project
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11. Gamification Project Concept
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• Behavioral bias: Overweighting small probabilities
– Large gamble is preferred to small but certain rewards
• Basic Idea: rather than pay each customer his/her
contributed marginal benefit; pool total system benefit and
raffle a few large rewards
• Benefits:
– Can circumvent ‘small payment syndrome’
– Cost effective: can actually pay less on an average customer
basis
– Repeated payments for performance will reinforce the bias

12. • Experimental Group
– Lottery incentive
– N = 200 households
• Control Group
– Fixed rebate incentive of $25 for entire summer
– N = 200 households
• Demand Response Events
– Each event is 4 hours in duration (7 PM - 11 PM)
– 5ºF temperature setpoint increase
– 6 Events called over the summer 2014 (unseasonably cool)
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The Experiment Design

13. 13
The Incentive Mechanism: Lottery Tier
Qualification

14. 14
Mean Customer Participation Times
The difference in performance is most pronounced on the
hottest day.
µe = mean event participation time for experimental group
µc = mean event participation time for control group

15. • The average marginal cost to the utility was
– experimental group: $0.67 / hour of customer participation
– control group: $1.1 / hour of customer participation
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Mean Customer Participation Times

16. 16
Dependency on Temperature

17. • Early winners stayed more engaged even with small prizes
• Lowered incentive payout
• Incentive design for (disruptive) load control programs
should exploit these behavioral biases
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Findings

18. Questions?
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