Carbon Cash is an application that motivates college students to conserve electricity in their dorms with real time usage data and personalized rewards.
Carbon Cash addresses what is known in energy efficiency as the split incentive problem. This is when a tenant is living in a building where the landlord pays for the electricity or it is a fixed cost factored into the tenant’s rent. Tenants in this scenario are left without an incentive to reduce their own electricity consumption and landlords are left with higher energy costs as their tenants adopt irresponsible consumption behavior. This is an especially pervasive problem in student housing.