Promoting Energy Awareness in Two Federal Workplaces

摘要

This project's goal is to promote energy saving behaviors among employees at federal work places and to find approaches that can be effective in other work places. The Wisconsin state energy office launched this project and identified the federal partners: a laboratory and a hospital. The next step was working with internal stakeholder teams to achieve buy-in for the project and to understand the technological and social dimensions of energy use that were unique to each facility. Program delivery was customized based on their feedback. Surprisingly, the teams resisted traditional awareness approaches such as friendly competition between departments, lotteries, individual prizes, and pledges. Instead, stakeholders preferred approaches that did not spotlight one worker over coworkers, and minimized friction between departments, such as rewards to the entire organization. The next step was performing engineering "operational" audits, to determine where the best savings opportunities were, and to establish a baseline. Based on the audits, behaviors targeted for change pertained to office equipment (including use of monitor power management), lighting, fume hoods, thermostats, blinds, and air conditioning. An educational campaign was launched and technical assistance was offered to operations and maintenance staff. The project was expanded to include pilots of energy-saving hardware that relate to occupant behavior. Project results are being transferred to several other State and local government facilities.