Interesting. This blog post about the “Era of Open Energy Information” mentions the use of APIs, allowing developers to build their own tools that pulls in energy data. Makes perfect sense, but hadn’t really thought of it in those terms before. Still not quite sure I understand how the data is extracted from the smart grid receiver, but I’m assuming someone has figured that problem out. As we’ve seen proven on the web over and over again, once you open up the data nerds will find something fun to do with it. Of course there are some dangers of privacy, etc., but that’s the case with any new technology …
Posts Tagged ‘smartgrid’
Smart Grid APIs
Thursday, October 8th, 2009Smart Energy Usage
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009Commenting on Google’s Power Meter, Felix Salmon sums up the need for better information on individual energy consumption:
The behavioral sociology of measuring energy usage is simple: the more you know about how much energy you’re using, the less you use. Just getting the information cuts most people’s energy usage by somewhere between 5% and 15%, while people with high electricity bills (like me) find it much easier to isolate exactly what is causing those bills and can then work out how best to reduce them through upgrading appliances or replacing incandescent bulbs with CFLs or any number of other routes to energy efficiency.
Nicely put. (Via Kottke.org)
Psychology of Saving
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009So I may be a little obsessed with behavioral economics, but this article about how Obama is using it had some gems for both energy and health.
Which message would persuade homeowners to save electricity: a call to their environmental conscience, or an appeal to their wallet? Cialdini tested those approaches in a San Diego experiment, and the answer was neither. What worked was an appeal to conformity. Residents used less power when they were told their neighbors were using less power. We’re a herdlike species, more likely to be obese if our peers are.
Interesting to think about, especially as part of smart-grid applications. Maybe just showing savings isn’t enough.
And this quote about health data, while not exactly about behavioral economics is worth sharing/thinking about:
More information can make us healthier too, which is why the stimulus poured $1.1 billion into “comparative effectiveness” research. Orszag has reams of charts showing that medical tactics and costs vary wildly across the country, with little regard for what works. He’d like to document best practices — from emergency-room to-do lists that dramatically reduce infections to protocols for when pricey tests and surgeries really help — and then have all medical providers adopt them. This approach has helped American anesthesiologists reduce deaths as well as costs.
How can GE help to make more of this data public, available and easily sharable between both medical organizations and individuals?
Ambient Power Information
Saturday, March 14th, 2009
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.