Comparison groups on bills: Automated, personalized energy information

A program called “Innovative Billing” has been developed to provide individualized energy information for a mass audience—the entire residential customer base of an electric or gas utility. Customers receive a graph on the bill that compares that customerʹs consumption with other similar customers for the same month. The program aims to stimulate customers to make efficiency improvements. To group as many as several million customers into small “comparison groups”, an automated method must be developed drawing solely from the data available to the utility. This paper develops and applies methods to compare the quality of resulting comparison groups.