National Grid removes a big barrier to heat pump adoption

Imagine that it’s the middle of winter, and you are sitting on the sofa watching Home Alone for the third time this year. Halfway through the hijinks, you start to feel colder than usual and check the thermostat. It’s lower than your setpoint, and panic sets in as you discover your furnace is dead You call friends, neighbors, and relatives for recommendations. You need a new furnace installed ASAP. You’re probably not concerned with efficiency or sustainability—you just want some heat. The last thing on your mind is a heat pump.

This is how 70% of HVAC system replacements begin. Most people don’t understand what heat pumps are or how they work. When your house is cold, the time for learning has passed. So how can utilities help shift a customer’s mindset before an HVAC-related emergency? National Grid, an electric and gas utility serving Massachusetts and New York, has a real need to answer that question because its net- zero plan includes converting millions of homes to electric heat pumps. The National Grid team recently found a new way to remove the education and awareness barrier to heat pump adoption.

Engaging customers with personalized education and outreach

For over a decade, National Grid has relied on Oracle Opower to deliver personalized, multichannel communications to millions of customers and influence a variety of customer actions. For example, National Grid and Opower more than doubled the BYOT enrollment rate, nearly tripled the pace of completed weatherization projects, and shifted nearly 80% of EV charging load off peak.

“Opower has helped us increase awareness and adoption of so many of our customer programs,” says Laura Baez, senior marketing analyst at National Grid. “When we needed help getting our customers past the heat pump education barrier, we knew Opower could get it done.”

National Grid’s Opower Home Energy Reports served as a natural launching point for a multichannel heat pump adoption campaign. To raise customers’ awareness and nudge them to purchase, the utility included disaggregated heating and cooling insights and heat pump rebate promotions in paper and email home energy reports. Over 100,000 behavioral program participants saw this heat pump content, and thousands of them clicked to learn more. During this campaign, National Grid saw a 10X spike in traffic on their heating and cooling programs page and 6X more traffic on its heat pump rebates page.

Creating “Aha” moments with personalized videos

You may have heard the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times (PDF) faster than text. In the past few years, National Grid found that personalized video is a powerful medium to educate energy consumers and influence them to act. “We know we only get a few moments of attention with each customer,” says Baez. “I told the Opower team we need to do a lot in 90 seconds or less: explain how heat pumps work, show in personal terms how they help your wallet, well-being, and carbon footprint, and offer a big heat pump rebate. The heat pump videos Opower created somehow got it all done.”

Over several summer months, Opower ran a personalized email campaign that invited National Grid customers to watch a video made just for them. These videos encouraged customers to purchase heat pumps with energy disaggregation insights and a simple explanation of how heat pumps work (1:37). Customers saw how much they were spending on heating and cooling, learned about heat pump technology, and received a call to action to learn more. Customers opened the emails at well over 2X the industry average, and 80% of those customers clicked through and watched all the personalized video content. From there, thousands of people followed the video’s link to the National Grid heat pump rebates page and ultimately purchased.

Videos were just one piece of National Grid’s larger heat pump awareness program, and they made an outsized impact. In a single month, 44% of rebate page traffic came from people viewing the videos. National Grid used personalized print, email, and video outreach to boost education and awareness and convert thousands of households to heat pump technology. That success was a critical step toward National Grid meeting its net-zero targets.

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