Wendell Grinton: Energy messaging can lead to savings

The following story was written in April 2021 by Charles Pullen in ENGL 4824: Science Writing as part of a collaboration between the English department and the Center for Communicating Science.

This photo shows a young Black male dressed in a bright orange Nike sweatshirt and wearing a bike-helmet-like contraption on his head. His head and shoulders are showing and he is looking directly into the camera. — For his Nutshell Games presentation in 2020, Wendell Grinton wore the brain imaging device that he uses in his research. Image is a screenshot from Grinton's Nutshell Games video.

In 2019, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the average monthly electricity bill in American households was $115. This cost includes heating, cooling, lighting, and everything else required to run a household. What if there was an easy way to decrease this bill by up to 20 percent?

That is what Wendell Grinton is trying to achieve.

Grinton is a second-year Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He wants to help people save money by changing how they use energy. He creates messaging that will encourage energy savings.

To discover how messages affect thinking, Grinton uses a brain imaging device called fNIRS, a “machine that's hooked up that has a cap that's similar to a swim cap that swimmers wear,” says Grinton. “It has sensors on the entire cap and it measures the change in light absorption within your brain.” The acronym stands for Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy.

Using fNIRS while showing people receiving messages about energy savings provides data to Grinton about which messages produce the most response in people.

“I have messages about monetary gains and losses, messages about the environment, messages about goal setting, and then I have a loss aversion message,” he explains. “We want to know which of these are most effective.”

Grinton shows participants a variety of messages that attempt to appeal to people in different ways. In preliminary studies, Grinton found that messages about monetary gains and losses induced the most significant response.

This image shows a cell phone screen with a text message that reads "With great power comes great responsibility. Don't miss your chance to save money on your energy bills." — Researcher Wendell Grinton is interested in the response of ratepayers to various kinds of messaging. Image courtesy of Wendell Grinton.

Grinton’s research has three main priorities for consumers, he says. He wants to “(1) learn more about their energy use, (2) save them more money on their energy bills, and (3) improve the communication of how energy is presented.” He hopes that accomplishing these goals will help solve a host of problems facing the world today: “Communication, energy efficiency, energy-related behaviors, carbon footprint, monetary issues.”

Turning off the lights to save money isn’t challenging. However, it can be easy to forget. Grinton explains his research as “finding a way to make it easier for people to save money without actually having to do a lot of extraneous work to save that money.”

How much money could effective communication save? Grinton’s estimates predict that it could save between 5 percent and 20 percent on monthly energy bills. For the average American’s bill, that could be between $6 and $23 monthly. For some households, this could just be saving money roughly equal to the cost of a Netflix subscription, but other households need and appreciate all of the savings they can get. These money-tight households are part of what inspired Grinton’s research.

“I’ve had family members and friends who sometimes struggled to make ends meet,” Grinton explains.

This image shows a monthly bill breakdown. Some of the text reads, "You have used 52% more energy this week compared to last week!" A bar chart shows the cost of various parts of the residence, including the living room, the air conditioner, the garage, the master bath, etc. — Another example of the kinds of messaging Grinton's research evaluates. Image courtesy of Wendell Grinton.

Grinton’s aim for his research is not just to save money but also to help the environment. As a civil engineer, one of his focuses is on sustainability.

“[Helping the environment] led me to want to go to grad school to learn more about sustainable practices and ways in which we make the environment and world better,” he says.

Effective energy messaging helps save money and the environment. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, about 16 percent of all energy used in the United States is for residential purposes. A 5 percent to 20 percent reduction in household energy use translates to a very significant 1 percent to 3 percent decrease in the total energy needs of the nation.

Even though the goal of Grinton’s research is to help others, the process has not been smooth sailing—and one of the most significant barriers to getting accurate results on the best types of messaging has been the participants themselves. He found that the participants were not giving accurate or honest results during surveys or interviews, which led him to find another way to record their responses.

“We wanted to get a better reading of how people were responding to these messages and how people thought about the messages, and so we're using the brain imaging device to take away that human error factor,” he explains. The use of fNIRS allows him to get more accurate responses.

Despite the difficulties, Grinton’s research on finding the best messaging continues. One day we may all be getting texts telling us how we can save on our energy bill—and the texts will be shaped by Grinton’s studies.