Social billing – now there’s an idea

Alex Leslie - 10/01/12

In an appeal to our greener nature, eco entrepreneur Opower has teamed up with Facebook to allow neighbourhoods to share bills, to save the planet and – er – money.

Green is good. Facebook, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and clean tech startup Opower have announced a partnership to deliver a social networking energy app that will help consumers monitor, improve and compare their home’s energy usage with their friends and Facebook users.

The app is designed to improve energy awareness and has the potential to combine the 800 million+ users on Facebook with Opower’s network of over 60 utility partners reaching 55 million U.S. households. The first steps are less ambitious though, with just a few participating utilities at launch in early 2012.

Opower, a SaaS company, currently helps electric and gas utilities understand how their customers are using power. Home owners use Opower’s online apps to understand their usage patterns, set consumption goals and even receive ‘overage’ alerts – allowing customers to reduce consumption before the end of the billing cycle.

Commonwealth Edison (ComEd), the City of Palo Alto (Calif.) and Glendale Water & Power (GWP) will be the first U.S. utilities to offer their customers the ability to import usage data into the social energy application. Combined, these utilities offer access to four million customers, including all of Chicago’s residents, who can soon benchmark their home’s energy usage against a national average of similar homes and compare their energy use with their Facebook friends. Energy efficiency has the ability to generate $700 billion in cost savings in the U.S. alone and this provides an example of a trend that will emerge during 2012.

As with all new ideas there is an initial period of explosive ‘top line’ growth, where a grab for market share is the driver. This is followed by a consolidation as the real value proposition is sought. Both of these can be likened to Facebook trends – first the explosion in the number of ‘friends’ then the consolidation into real, useful communities, along with a number of Facebook lookalikes.

Already the recommendation of friends is a powerful sales tool, now, with the ability for customers to force transparency on utility companies by comparing prices in public, fairness for customers and competition for companies will enter a new phase.