If you live in the United States and use electricity there is a great service which you may not have heard of which could help you get paid for saving electricity and saving the environment too.
That service is called OhmConnect
How it works
I've been using OhmConnect for two years now and they pay me money if I use less electricity during designated one hour periods they call an "Ohm Hour". You authorize them to check your hourly usage as reported by the power company and then they pay you proportionately by how much less you used during that hour vs. your predicted usage. Now you might happen to use less because you're out for the day but if you're home the idea is you turn down your cooling or heating, turn off some devices or whatever you can. Personally, I go to the breaker box and turn off everything but the fridge and the Wifi.
In the two years I've been using OhmConnect I've been paid over $600 - it's real money and I've withdrawn it and spent it, definitely not a scam. They also have their own online store that offers some energy saving devices like WiFi thermostats and smart plugs which can be hooked up to their service and automatically turn things off during an Ohm Hour. You'll get a substantial bonus when you connect one of those devices to their service making it even cheaper to own. If you don't want money you can also join a team and donate your earnings to a charity of your choosing - there are many teams and quite a few give their money to schools.
Here's a snapshot from my OhmConnect dashboard for the last two OhmHours. It shows what my expected usage was and how much I actually used and how many points I was rewarded. The points are worth 1 cent each so you can see in just two events (actually one was a two-hour event) I made over $20 for reducing the power. Awesome.
To encourage participation in OhmHours they offer bonuses the more concurrent hours you participate and save power in. If you say you will participate and do not lower your consumption they deduct from your current balance (yes you can go negative but they won't ever send you a bill, it'll just apply against any future earnings when you do). If you know you're going to be cooking dinner, vacuuming or otherwise sucking down the power you can opt-out at any time before it starts - you usually get at least one day notice. You can also control which hours of the day you are offered OhmHours to participate in so if you know you're always busy using power around dinner time you can exclude those. They also offer participation in double and triple OhmHours which happen much less often but have even higher rewards.
OhmHours are announced by a text message or email to you and as I mentioned you usually get at least a one day notice which gives you ample time to opt-out and avoid penalties or make alternative plans to curtail your energy use.
How am I "saving the environment"
I mentioned earlier that you can "save the environment", how is that? Well OhmHours are timed to coincide with peak usage of power on the energy grid. This is when the grid operators must consider starting up emergency generation capacity to meet forecast high demand. They can do this based on predicted weather, high energy consuming events or known loss of another generation capacity for maintenance. The thing is those emergency power plants are often very dirty - they are not optimized for low CO2 and other emissions, just to get power onto the grid quickly. We have one in my neighborhood and it burns jet fuel. It almost never runs but when it does the company makes big bucks. Power that goes for less than $0.10 a kwH at off peak hours can cost the grid $1, $2 even $10 a kwH and that allows them to make a big profit burning dirty expensive fuel.
So by having a large number of people commit to reducing their power a peak times instead of having the grid add capacity the operators can avoid running these polluting and inefficient peak power plants (they call them "peakers").
How do they make money to pay me?
Because those peaker power plants are so expensive to use the grid can save big bucks if they don't. That makes it worth their while to pay quite a lot of $ to anyone not using power. They call power not used "negawatts", a play on "megawatts". OhmConnect get paid that money and pass on a lot of it to us the consumer. Obviously, they take a cut of the money to keep their lights on, but I don't begrudge them. The service was previously only available to commercial entities or in a very limited way via power utilities so they are really helping consumers with this extra opportunity.
Availability
This service was initially only offered in California but a while back there was a Supreme Court ruling that allowed them to offer it in all US States. AFAIK you can sign up for OhmConnect almost anywhere.
Who shouldn't sign up?
Full disclosure - I've referred many people to OhmConnect and had a lot of people very happy with it. However, some people use so little power already that it is hardly worth them participating. Indeed they struggle to save any amount of power and may get negative points more often than positive ones.
However, it costs nothing to join and if it doesn't work out just stop using it - doesn't hurt to try right? I certainly can't guarantee you'll make $300 a year like I do - my bills can be pretty high not least because California has some of the nations most expensive power for consumers thanks to us being screwed by Enron. We also have an electric clothes drier, water heater and oven which means we are much higher consumers than those using gas for all those things.
Some utilities also have other programs where they manage your thermostat during peak hours that are not compatible with OhmConnect - if you don't use much other power it may be more benefical to stick with that program and not use OhmConnect.
Referrals
Like many companies, OhmConnect uses a referral scheme to help build their user base. If you refer someone and they sign up and participate for a while then you'll end up with an additional $20 bonus. You get referral links to share on your social media. My link is https://ohm.co/9499a1f and it would be awesome if you use it but of course, you don't have to.
Questions?
Got questions about using OhmConnect? I'll be happy to answer them in the comments below. Or you can check out their FAQ page or contact their support people via chat during business hours here: https://login.ohmconnect.com/help