Real time monitoring of your energy consumption
August 24, 2010 | Length: 00:02:58
Would you conserve energy if you could monitor your consumption by the hour? Lucid Design Group has developed new software that provides users with instant feedback on how much energy they're using. SmartPlanet visits the start-up to see their dashboard up close.
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Hardware Interfaces? Profit-Driven Scheme despite Noble Proposition
Unless the other fundamental matters are addressed that have allowed access and influence to indulge human greed for a select group of hucksters as exhibited by spiraling costs of compensation, pension benefits, and other incidents of plundering and pillaging then there will be social issues ahead.
Grants and subsidies purge civic coffers as the quasi-public and government supported enterprises are indulged to enhance their profits despite deteriorating infrastructure and unimproved service. Service hasn't improved since dereg and other transitions although profit-driven shemes, opacity, socio-economic disparity, infrastructure deterioration, and environmental risks as well as hazard occurrence have all definitely grown. These entities should have remained publicly controlled but, despite all the promises and supposed guarantees otherwise, all they have become is our worst nightmare - socially supported schemes that private profit.
While citizens are actually conserving, reusing, or reducing use while having to pay more because the operators have really gotten greedy while obfuscating regulation or environmental and citizen protections, then the endeavor is suspect. The assessments need to be determined using all effects beside whatever is assumed by the display of a software algorithm since there are other matters of socioeconomic disparity, taxpayer debt burden, producing evermore e-waste, secondary energy consumption, heat generation, as well as environmental threats such as industrial waste, cooling requirements and resource consumption. Sure there are some benefits observed in supposed structural innovations utilizing natural lighting and ventilation (not much is actually innovative since it all is a return to sanity and fundamentally beneficial practices that were long ignored for the sake of technology) and materials. Perhaps localized benefits are accountable and possible but when corporate culture gets involved then the overall aim seems like greenwashing to me.
RE: Real time monitoring of your energy consumption
The costs of implementation for this technology are something to consider - but if the monitors actually spur changes in habits, the cost-benefit analysis may come out in their favor ...
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>> Sumi Das: You're looking at the David Brower Center, the greenest office building in all of Berkeley, California. Among its sustainable features, this dashboard, a real-time monitor of all the energy consumption in the building, from water to electricity use.
>> Amy Tobin: I like to walk around the building and see who's got their lights on in the offices and talk with our resident organizations about why they do or don't have their lights on.
>> Sumi Das: The Energy Dashboard is the brain child of Lucid Design Group. Michael Murray, the company's founder, started researching the concept six years ago while a student at Oberlin College in Ohio.
>> Michael Murray: The research had to do with this question of would people change their behavior to conserve electricity by turning off lights in the presence of real-time information. And what we found is that there is a very interesting psychological effect. People are motivated to conserve electricity, but only in the presence of real-time information.
>> Sumi Das: So Murray and his team developed software that provides users with instant feedback on their own energy consumption -- day by day, hour by hour, even minute by minute.
>> Michael Murray: Instead of waiting 45 days to receive their electricity bill at the end of the month, they can log onto the Web site and see within a 60-second update of what their electricity use is.
>> Sumi Das: Today, Lucid has started testing their software at colleges around the country. Here's how it works at Hamilton College in New York.
>> Vladi Shunturov: When you first land on the profile of the building, you can see what are the resources which we monitor for this building, and all these resources are monitored every minute. You can see the Science Center at Hamilton College is monitored for electricity, total water use and total natural gas consumption.
>> Sumi Das: And the software can drill down deeper, allowing users to translate kilowatts per hour into dollars.
>> Vladi Shunturov: As you switch units and switch to money, you can see piles of money piling up. So we do this to engage people who don't really understand what a kilowatt hour is and express that in terms that a lay audience can relate to.
>> Sumi Das: In the future, energy data from Lucid's Dashboard will integrate with social networking sites, enabling users to share energy consumption and costs as well as their impact on the environment.
>> Vladi Shunturov: We wanted to enable decision makers and also sustainability coordinators to be able to use the Dashboard as a platform to openly communicate all the efforts that they're taking towards reaching sustainability.
>> Sumi Das: For SmartPlanet, I'm Sumi Das.
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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====