[Editor's Note: This podcast from Marc Gunther was published in tandem with "The Power of Peer Pressure in Combatting Climate Change," a profile of Dan Yates' company, OPower. You can read that post on ClimateBiz.com.]

Marc Gunther: This is Marc Gunther for GreenBiz.com. I'm here today with Dan Yates. Dan is the founder and CEO of OPower. OPower is a company that helps people conserve energy, and we'll talk about that in a moment, but first a little about Dan. He's just 32, but he previously started and sold an educational software company, then spent about a year traveling with his girlfriend, now his wife, from the Arctic Circle in Alaska to the tip of South America. It was that adventure that led Dan to start OPower. Dan, first tell us why you started the company, and then please describe OPower. Tell us what you do.

Dan Yates: Thanks, Marc. Yeah. I started with my good friend and co-founder Alex Lasky, who is president of OPower. We started it very specifically to have a large scaled impact on emissions. I, in light of my background in information services, having started up a previous internet start-up, and Alex, with his background in politics and policy, surveyed the landscape looking at a bunch of different opportunities.

We quickly realized that our ability to contribute to the big science experiment kind of projects, like big new solar panel technology and biofuels, was relatively limited, and so we focused on efforts in a domain that we thought we could apply our skills to really have that kind of scaled impact. That was in the area of information to consumers, to help people really understand their energy use and reduce it. That's what OPower is all about.

MG: What does OPower actually do? How do you help people conserve energy?

DY: What we do is we partner with utilities, and we help them. We bring in all of their energy information. We bring to the table a whole host of other data elements -- housing data, demographic data, localized weather data streams.

We combine all of this together, and run a number of increasingly sophisticated analytics, so that we come out on the other end with a good understanding of the customer situation, both overall and then specifically their energy profile and how they're using energy.

Then what we do is we help utilities to really radically amp up the quality and, in most cases, the quantity of their communications to their customers. What that translates into specifically is a multi-channel approach where we help utilities really increase the quality of the tools and the functionality on their website.

Then, interestingly for us as software folks, most impactfully we have been engaging customers directly through the mail, through our energy reports. Those reports show people how their energy use compares to their neighbors'. We have a background and the core part of our company's DNA is behavioral science expertise. We apply that in these reports very prominently, and also on the website. That's where this focus on the neighbor comparison comes in.

Then we also, once we've caught people's attention, it's how you're ranking, how you stack up to the folks near you who you think of as similar to you. Then we give them very targeted recommendations, using all of those insights and analytics I described before.

What's exciting about it and what's fundamentally why we're in this business, as I described before, is that we have measured conclusively that this multi-channel approach yields between two and three percent reductions across now millions of consumers.