People using energy-efficient smart thermostats are willing to sacrifice comfort and control to save relatively small amounts of energy that could add up if enough people sign on, a Georgia Tech economist reported in a recent study.
With federal and state energy policies targeting aggressive decarbonization in the next 15 years, smart technologies have the potential to help achieve these goals at a reasonable cost, said Casey J. Wichman, associate professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Economics.
In a forthcoming issue of American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Wichman and colleagues report that automation within smart thermostats can lead to potentially large reductions in household electricity use and costs.
Read the full paper: https://research.gatech.edu/save-energy-users-let-smart-thermostats-take-lead