Pilots
Innovative Customer Targeting Pilot
What is the Innovative Customer Targeting Pilot?
The Customer Targeting Pilot developed a strategy to maximize heat pump electrification benefits, using meter-based customer targeting to identify customers for whom the value of electrification is most compelling. This innovative approach was empowered by understanding utility customers’ meter-based electricity and gas consumption.
Market Barriers Addressed by the Pilot
One of the best ways to grow heat pump demand is to install heat pumps in the homes of customers who are most likely to reduce their energy bills. These positive outcomes will create positive public perceptions and substantiate heat pumps’ superior efficiency and performance. Because energy use differs among California homes, energy bill impacts of decarbonization differs too. Current California utility (electricity and gas) rates are priced such that not every customer who electrifies their home will reduce their annual utility bills, even using efficient electric heat pump HVAC or heat pump water heater technology. Currently, contractors, utilities, and program implementers lack a scalable method to find customers most likely to experience positive electrification outcomes, like utility bill savings.
Most electrification energy impact assessments are made for homes on a case-by-case basis, after a customer has already expressed interest. Furthermore, the lack of large-scale customer targeting methods poses a major market barrier to scaling heat pump adoption. Just as importantly, contractors, utilities, and programs also lack a way to avoid promoting heat pumps to customers most likely to suffer increased energy burdens or add to grid stress in already stressed areas. Though heat pump adoption must increase rapidly, not all customers must convert to a heat pump at once. Meanwhile, policy changes and new electrification-friendly utility rates could ensure that all customers – not just those with specific energy usage patterns – would benefit from installing heat pumps.
The Customer Targeting Dashboard: Identifying Those Who Will Benefit the Most
To implement meter-based targeting at scale, the pilot team built a customer targeting dashboard based on 2.3 million customers’ historical energy consumption data. The dashboard offered 20 interactive controls and analytics that supported customer targeting by comparing average energy use for the targeted customer group to that of the general population.
The pilot team collaborated with Southern California Edison (SCE) to identify customer types most likely to experience net annual utility bill savings after installing a heat pump HVAC and/or heat pump water heater, including:
- Customers with disproportionately high cooling loads, who could use a heat pump to replace an inefficient electric air-conditioning system.
- Customers with rooftop solar arrays that produce more electricity than their house needs, who could install a load-shifting-enabled heat pump water heater and power it entirely with excess on-site solar energy.
The pilot team also tested which direct customer outreach strategies and are most successful in motivating customers to engage with outreach material(s) and install a heat pump.
Research Questions
- Which Californians will benefit the most from electrification, and what kinds of outreach most effectively motivates them to install a heat pump?
- Did customers who opened emails sent by the pilot team and SCE and clicked on the Switch Is On website participate in TECH Clean California (“convert”) at a statistically significantly higher rate than customers who neither opened nor clicked?
- Did customers who received a more personalized email (explaining how the customer’s past electricity consumption made them a good candidate for a heat pump) engage with emails at a statistically significantly higher rate than those who received a more generic email?
- Are there statistically significant demographic differences between customers who opened, clicked, and converted compared to the general SCE population?
- Were electricity and gas savings, peak demand savings, total system benefit (“TSB”), greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions savings, and utility bill savings significantly higher for targeted customers who converted compared to the overall TECH Clean California participant population?
Featured Results
Results from this pilot are featured in the following events and resources:
The pilot team presented on meter-based electrification targeting at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) Behavior, Energy, and Climate Change (BECC) conference in Sacramento, California in November 2023. This conference caters to social scientists and marketing experts from the clean energy and energy efficiency spheres. The presentation highlighted the pilot team’s successful partnership with SCE, use of digital re-targeting, and early metered based impacts analysis of customers targeted based on high air conditioning usage.
The pilot team has also published a series of articles and presentations on the TECH Clean California public reporting website. Customer targeting featured in the first TECH Clean California Data Webinar in October 2023.
Pilot team partner Recurve also published “How Targeting Can Transform Electrification Initiatives”, an overview of the pilot’s progress to-date and the applicability of its methods to electrification throughout the US.
Finally, the pilot team and SCE co-hosted a webinar on the power of meter-based targeting to support customer pre-screening for low-income direct install electrification programs. This technique was deployed to pre-screen customers at risk of electrification-driven utility bill increases for the SCE Energy Savings Assistance Building Electrification Pilot.