How do you know whether your house is energy efficient. Well one options is to measure this by heat maps that illustrate the waste of heat to the surrounding areas. Geoffrey Hay and colleagues published in Remote Sensing an article about a pilot project that allows residents access their heat maps as easy as clicking on their house on a Google map. Knowing that feedback is effecting decision making, this information can be instrumental in nudging people to insulate their house. Especially if they see their house is less efficient that their neighbors.

I can imagine that there all kind of privacy issues that need to be addressed before this technology would be applied more generally, but it has the potential to make a major impact in energy saving if it is combined with effective incentives to reduce energy consumption.