Tuesday, 19 Octorber 2011

Facebook, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and Opower have entered a first-of-its-kind partnership to jointly develop an application on top of Facebook's platform with the goal of becoming the world's largest social energy community.

The latest conception of what the app may look like when it launches in 2012.

The companies will be combining Facebook's 800 million user base with Opower's access to energy usage data from its 60 utility partners (spanning more than 55 million households). When the app launches in the first quarter of 2012, people across the country will be able to benchmark their home energy use against a national average of similar homes, compare energy use with friends, share tips on how to become more efficient, and form competitive energy-efficiency teams using a platform they are already intimately acquainted with.

Since 2008 when Opower delivered its first Home Energy Report, the company says it has received "tremendous feedback" and learned that most people want to be more energy efficient but lack the tools and information. By bringing actionable information and tips to the world's largest social network, Opower is confident that it will create a global dialogue about energy efficiency.   

"Very few energy monitoring services contain any sort of social aspect to them.  Opower pioneered the idea of neighborhood comparisons that motivate people to improve energy efficiency--first through mailed Home Energy Reports and now through a multi-channel customer engagement platform that includes email, SMS alerting and an online portal," Ogi Kavazovic, Vice President of Marketing & Strategy for Opower, told FierceEnergy. "By partnering with Facebook and making this application accessible to its 800 million users, we're deepening our investment in the social aspects of our platform that, to this point, has been widely successful."

According to Kavazovic, the key to success is critical mass of utility partners and access to energy usage data.

"We have an already engaged customer base of several million homes receiving our neighbor-comparison reports, which we see as the natural early adopters of this app. It would be quite difficult for another company to try to replicate our global network of utilities and energy consumers," Kavazovic said.

Commonwealth Edison (ComEd), the City of Palo Alto Utilities in California, and Glendale Water & Power (GWP) will be the first participating U.S. utilities offering their customers the ability to import usage data into the social energy application.

"We see this new application as an exciting way to offer additional choice, control and value to our customers and as a platform on which we can help build the next generation of smarter customer energy-efficiency programs," Val Jensen, Vice President of Marketing and Environmental Programs at ComEd told FierceEnergy.

Over the past four years, Opower has cultivated partnerships with 60 utilities globally. Although several other utilities are expected to announce their participation in this effort in the coming weeks, Kavazovic said that "the participation from these utilities alone will make it easy for the 4 million customers from those utilities, including all residents of Chicago, to start using the new application as soon as it is launched."