GE Adventure

One of our stops at the Global Research Center was a chat with the team working on Smart Grid stuff (which I plan on getting into deeper as soon as I finish dumping all the photos off my camera). A big part of the Smart Grid idea seems to be about giving consumers a more real-time peak into the costs around their power usage (with the hope that it will effect their behavior, of course).

Anyway, I was reading an old issue of Wired today and ran across this article about using ambient displays to help people monitor their electricity usage. (There is a company called Ambient Devices¹ that sells some interesting stuff in this realm, including an umbrella whose handle glows when it’s going to rain.) As Clive Thompson explains,

Electricity is invisible. That’s why we waste so much of it in the home — leaving rechargers permanently plugged in and electronic devices idling in power-slurping “sleep” modes. We can’t see that our houses account for nearly a quarter of the nation’s energy appetite; we don’t know when the grid is nearing capacity and expensive to use.

So [Mark] Martinez [of Southern California Edison] hacked his customers’ perceptual apparatuses. He made energy visible.

Made me think a lot about what other types of displays could be developed to help consumers monitor their usage in a non-dollars-and-cents sort of way. Thompson even offers up his own ideas, “Here’s an even wilder idea: How about making our energy use visible to everyone? Imagine if your daily consumption were part of your Facebook page — and broadcast to your friends by RSS feed. That would trigger what Ambient Devices CEO David Rose calls the sentinel effect: You’d work harder to conserve so you don’t look like a jackass in front of your peers.” (Dopplr does this in an interesting way with your carbon display.) Seems like there’s a ton of opportunity to find really interesting ways to deliver this kind of information to consumers.

Both of the bottom two products (not the meter) are taken from the Ambient Devices website.

¹Update (4/6/09): Rick noted this disclosure in the comment: “Full disclosure from an elder Barbarian – Noah may not know that Ambient Devices is actually an old client of ours, and we’re friends with David, as well as his former fellow executive Nabeel Hayatt, who’s over at Conduit Labs now!” Just wanted to clear it up. I had no idea.