How Consumers Respond to the Changing Energy Landscape: From Energy Conservation to Microgrid

In this two-part episode, host Jeff McMahon explores a pair of University of Chicago studies on consumer energy behavior. First, McMahon sits down with EPIC’s Koichiro Ito, an assistant professor at Harris Public Policy, for insight on what motivates consumers to conserve energy. Does simple encouragement work? Or do prices need to rise for them to act? Then, McMahon is joined by Bob Rosner, founding co-director of EPIC and a distinguished UChicago physicist and former director of Argonne National Laboratory, and Kathleen Cagney, a sociology professor and director of the Population Research Center at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at UChicago. The pair discuss the results of their survey examining attitudes toward smart meters and smart grids in low-income neighborhoods in Chicago.