PGE pushes efficiency with social media

Enlarge Image

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is screwing in a compact flourescent light bulb. Or wash your clothes using cold water. Or install a low-flow shower head.

Portland General Electric is setting out to encourage customers to use less energy and betting that social media — and a little peer pressure — will achieve results.

PGE's Operation Switch website launched this summer and has been quietly picking up steam. According to the utility, the effort has saved 351,260 kilowatt-hours of energy — enough to power roughly 31 average PGE customer homes for a year.

At the heart of Operation Switch are the missions. Customers are encouraged to take part in easy, short-term, energy-saving tasks. Each 'mission' is timed, with a set number of days to take part. Once the mission is completed, participants are urged to tell their friends about it using Twitter. A running tally of the energy-savings results will appear on the website.

"Energy efficiency is a cheap, clean energy source, and efforts like Operation Switch show the difference we can all make when we all save together," said Joe Barra, PGE's director of customer energy resources.

PGE is counting on energy efficiency to reduce its retail energy load by about 24 percent by 2015, reducing the need for new electricity generation resources.

christinawilliams@bizjournals.com | 503.219.3438