Information and Residential Energy Conservation

Information is widely considered as an effective instrument to induce socially desirable behavior. In particular in the energy sector, there is hope to achieve parts of the conservation and climate change mitigation commitments by information campaigns. Policy makers favor such non-price interventions because they neither burden public budgets nor political capital by imposing unpopular taxes. In fact, the academic literature provides plentiful evidence for the success of information campaigns in various domains. The present paper is the first to study the effects of an energy-saving awareness campaign on electricity consumption in the European context. In a large-scale randomized controlled trial using a sample of more than 120,000 households, we test for potential framing effects by introducing three treatment arms: a monetary motivation to safe energy, an ecological motivation, and a combination of both. After the treatment groups received four information letters between October 2014 and October 2015, we evaluated the households’ regularly metered electricity consumption. Our findings suggest that information campaigns do not decrease electricity consumption to a notable extent. Thanks to the large sample size, we are able to precisely estimate treatment effects clearly below one percent for all treatments and are thus able to exclude effect sizes that would be large enough to justify such interventions from a cost-effectiveness perspective. There is some indication, though, that treatment effects are heterogeneous and, thus, targeted campaigns might be effective. Overall, these findings do not substantiate the expectations associated with non-price interventions in bringing down energy consumption.