At NTC, we spend a lot of time helping organizations change behavior. So, it’s only fair that we occasionally test those same behavior change principles on ourselves.
In 2022, NTC launched Power Down Fridays as a simple experiment: During the summer, we would close our offices at noon on Fridays and encourage everyone to power down for the weekend.
The idea was straightforward. Less time in the office meant less lighting, less equipment running, less air conditioning and, hopefully, less energy use. You can read the white paper from last summer’s results here. But five summers later, Power Down Fridays has become something more interesting than a summer perk. It has become our own small, measurable behavior-change experiment considering the compelling results from the summer of 2026.
Five years of measurement will show how repetition, feedback, and reinforcement can turn a simple organizational initiative into sustained behavior change.
2026: 23.9% less electricity use than 2025
From June 5 through August 7, NTC’s combined electricity use across our two office spaces was a combined 16,689 kWh. That’s a 23.9% decrease compared with summer 2025, when the same spaces used 21,924 kWh.
There’s an important detail behind that number: July 2026 was warmer than July 2025. The average temperature in July 2026 was 78.9°F, compared with 75°F the year before. So, while weather is certainly one factor in summer electricity consumption, a warmer July doesn’t explain a 23.9% year-over-year reduction.
Something else was happening, too. We were powering down.
Five summers tell a bigger story
One year of data can be interesting. Five years start to give you a pattern. Since we began tracking summer electricity use, our combined consumption has looked like this:
| Summer | Combined Electricity Use |
|---|---|
|
2022 |
34,211 kWh |
|
2023 |
24,042 kWh |
|
2024 |
15,755 kWh |
|
2025 |
21,924 kWh |
|
2026 |
6,689 kWh |
There are a couple of things we like about this data.
First, 2024 remains our best summer yet, with the lowest total electricity use in the five-year period. Second, 2026 came remarkably close. At 16,689 kWh, this summer was just 934 kWh (or about 5.9%) above our 2024 low. Compared with where we started in 2022, the summer of 2026 represents a 51.22% reduction in summer electricity use.
That’s not a perfectly straight line, but that’s important.
In 2025, our electricity use increased significantly, climbing to 21,924 kWh. We didn’t simply continue moving downward every year. This year, we brought usage back down near our best-ever result.
One of the most interesting lessons here may be that measurement itself changes behavior. After seeing electricity consumption rise in 2025, we entered the summer of 2026 with greater awareness of our energy use. That translated into more intentional attention to thermostats, lighting and Friday shutdown routines. In other words, Power Down Fridays isn’t simply an intervention we’re measuring, the measurement has become part of the intervention.
Behavior change isn’t always linear, but measurement and reinforcement can help get behavior back on course. The goal is to create changes that can hold, adapt and come back.
So, is Power Down Friday responsible?
We can’t say that every kilowatt-hour saved was caused by Power Down Fridays. Electricity use is influenced by many things, including weather, building conditions, equipment, schedules and other operational factors. But the results give us a meaningful signal. For NTC leaders, we knew the results from last year’s efforts didn’t quite meet the goals we were aiming for and so that Friday noon shutdown became much more intentional, as did the communication to those renting our space.
The reduction occurred across both of our office spaces. And it happened even with a warmer July than the year before. Most importantly, the practice itself is repeatable.
Every Friday, employees have a clear reason to shut down. Lights go off. Computers and equipment are powered down. Offices empty earlier. And over time, those individual actions become part of the rhythm of the organization.
That’s where the experiment gets interesting.
The real lesson isn’t about turning off the lights
While we can’t attribute the entire electricity reduction to Power Down Fridays, the five years of data suggest that creating a recurring moment to focus on energy use, combined with measuring and sharing the results, can help reinforce energy-conscious behavior across an entire organization.
At NTC, we design programs that are intended to move people from awareness to understanding to action.
Power Down Fridays follows a remarkably similar path.
Give people a reason. (ENGAGE)
Make the action easy. (EQUIP)
Repeat it. (EXPAND)
Measure it. (MEASURE)
Learn from the results. (EDUCATE)
That’s the part we value most.
Because behavior change isn’t about finding one magic message that suddenly makes everyone act differently. It’s about creating the conditions for people to understand what matters, making the desired behavior achievable, and giving them opportunities to practice it. That’s exactly what we do with our educational programs every year.
Practice what we preach
NTC helps utilities, corporations, government agencies and other organizations engage people around behaviors that matter—from energy efficiency and conservation to waste reduction and other community initiatives.
We talk a lot about the importance of turning information into action. Power Down Fridays gives us a chance to do the same thing ourselves. We’re not just telling other organizations that behavior change can be measurable. We’re testing it. We’re collecting the data. We’re seeing what works, what doesn’t, and what happens when a simple action becomes part of an organization’s culture.
And five summers in, we’re pretty happy with what we’re seeing.
2024 remains our record-low summer. 2026 is a close second. The bigger win is that we now have five years of data showing what happens when an organization makes energy-conscious behavior part of the routine.
Sometimes meaningful change starts with something as simple as shutting down the lights on Friday.
Power down. See what happens.
