As I've mentioned before I've been reading the book Nudge and it's really great!  They tell a quick story about a power provider in California who (to help customers conserve energy) started displaying the average consumption of their customers on each bill so that customers could compare their usage to the average usage. This resulted in customers who used more power than average reducing their usage which was the intended effect.  However customers who used less power than average started using more energy. To limit this problem they added a smile / frown face to the bill beside the average.  Customers who used more power than average continued to conserve more.  The simple graphic helped customers who where already doing better than average stay above average (they wanted to keep that smiley face). I'd like Ottawa Hydro to implement this average and positive / negative icon system but what I'd really like them to do is take this a step further and show how each customer ranks.  So if you used the least energy you were ranked number one. I think this simple nudge would encourage consumers to reduce their energy usage since it provides them with regular feedback and creates a sense of competition (can you make the top 10?). This plan would be fairly simple to implement as it would only require adding a little more information to a bill that is already produced.  All of the information required to produce this information already needs to be tracked to produce the bill in the first place. It's a simple, inexpensive way of helping people reduce their energy use and it has already proved been proved effective by another utilities company.