Smartest smart meter: The gasoline pump?

By Elisa Wood

March 18, 2010

Americans do many things well. These things do not include sacrifice of creature comforts.

So it came as a surprise to see US Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash) suggest we can avert 20% of our energy use if we take short “military showers” over 20 weeks.http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/03/can-behavioral-changes-save-enough-energy-to-save-earth/1. Who the heck is going to do that?

We already know from Jimmy Carter-era energy policies that lecturing Americans does not result in sustained conservation. So what’s Baird getting at? A clinical psychologist, he is among a growing group looking at behavioral triggers that will encourage us to consume energy more intelligently.

To buy prudently, consumers need to know

1. What a product costs
2. How much of the product they need

Sounds obvious, but it’s often not how we’re sold electricity.

Imagine if you had never been in a supermarket, and all of your food was delivered on demand via a conveyor belt into your house. You pay for the food just once a month and have no idea of the cost for each item you eat. When your bill shoots up, you do not know why. Having never done any grocery shopping, you’re unaware of the high price of the many pints of out-of-season, raspberries you consumed. So you buy the raspberries again and again.

We buy electricity much the same way. Power costs vary throughout the day, but we are unaware of any variation because of the way we consume and pay.

However, the marriage of energy, information technology and behavioral science are changing the way we buy electricity and other forms of energy. Several new devices help us see price, consumptions and alternatives. These include real-time traffic maps that helps us avoid routes where the car will idle and eat up gasoline, Quicken-type software to track our energy costs, smart meters and other new gadgets that lift the cloak from energy pricing. In the March 16 article, “Microsoft Puts Its Weight Behind IT’s Energy-Saving Potential,”http://www.greenercomputing.com/blog/2010/03/16/microsoft-puts-weight-behind-it-energy-saving GreenerComputing’s Marc Gunther discusses some of these technologies and the “democratization of information” they create to end the blind way we now shop for energy.

In the vein of making the consumer more aware, the Natural Resources Defense Council this week published a white paper that shows what drivers suffer most when gasoline prices rise. The paper comes as some analysts predict prices will exceed $3/gallon again this spring.

The economic impact will differ by state based on per capita gasoline use, according to the NRDC paper. http://docs.nrdc.org/energy/files/ene_10031601a.pdf

Gasoline hikes hurt drivers most in these states:

• Mississippi
• Montana
• Louisiana
• Oklahoma
• South Carolina
• Kentucky
• Texas
• Maine
• Georgia
• Idaho

Price spikes cause the least economic harm in:

• Florida
• Washington
• Pennsylvania
• New Jersey
• Colorado
• New Hampshire
• Maryland
• Massachusetts
• New York
• Connecticut

Gasoline prices are more apparent than electricity prices to the consumer, since we see the cost each time we fill up at the pump. Indeed we see them blazing from lit signs along the roadway. We cannot miss each penny rise.

Perhaps that is why gasoline consumption drops when prices rise. People modify their behavior. Chances are if you spotted your state in the most vulnerable list, you’re already thinking of sacrifices or changes you will make this spring if the prices go up. It may be that behavioral psychologists need look no further than their neighborhood gas station for ideas on how to get people to take military showers. A price billboard in every home just might do the trick.

Visit Elisa Wood at http://www.realenergywriters.com/ and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

Googlifying the electric grid

By Elisa Wood

February 12, 2009

If you showed Alexander Graham Bell cell phone towers, he’d be stumped. But if you let Thomas Edison tinker with our electricity grid, he’d know just what to do — not because of his genius, but because electric transmission has changed little since Edison’s day. Telephone technology advanced; electricity did not. So says the Department of Energy. http://www.oe.energy.gov/1165.htm

Thus, we are now playing catch-up and pursuing a new, smart grid. This means we will incorporate digital technology which, among other things, allows for two-way communication. The grid will speak to us and we will speak back through our actions. The average householder will know the price of power as it constantly changes throughout the day, and based on the information, choose when to buy it.

The implications to society are huge. Like the Internet, which democratized information retrieval, the smart grid opens doors for new control by the common folk, in this case over energy management, now the domain of remote utilities and grid operators. Collectively, we will determine what kind of energy the nation uses and when. In a sense, we all become energy policymakers through our purchasing choices.

So it’s no surprise that Google, whose goal is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” announced this week that it will step in and help with the smartening. Google is not an energy company, but it understands how to make information retrieval user friendly – and this will be crucial to the success of the smart grid. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/power-to-people.html

John Petersen, chairman of the environmental studies program at Oberlin College, understands this need for simplicity in communicating energy concepts, as he shows in his creation of the Energy Orb. In today’s Energy Efficiency Markets podcast (www.realenergywriters.com), Petersen discusses Oberlin’s trial and error in getting students interested in managing their energy use. Initially, the college set up a website that monitored dorm energy use with colorful charts and graphs. But Peterson quickly realized it was too “techno-geeky.”

So taking a page from Ambient’s Stock Orb, a ball that glows different colors to show stock market activity, Petersen developed the Energy Orb. The glowing balls are placed in dorms, so students can pass by and see the buildings power consumption in real time. Red means high consumption, green is low. There is no need to get online and analyze charts. The Orb reveals the immediate truth. Dorms compete against each other to maximize efficiency by watching what their orbs say.

The Energy Orb is just one way we can googlify energy information management. Many other pilot projects are in the works that simplify information retrieval and encourage people to conserve. We’d like to use this space – and our weekly podcast – to feature some of these smart grid experiments. We invite you to submit them for consideration to realenergywriters@comcast.net

Visit Elisa Wood at www.realenergywriters.com and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

The Ghost of High Energy Prices Past

By Elisa Wood

Oct. 9, 2008

Halloween is still a few weeks away, but a ghost is already making an appearance, this one floating over the presidential campaigns. His name is Conservation.

I first heard the specter of sacrifice evoked by Sen. Barack Obama in the Oct. 7 debate. The next day Gov. Sarah Palin repeated the term several times in a television interview. Conservation, she said, is part of Senator John McCain’s “all-of-the-above” energy policy.

Wait a minute. Isn’t this the Jimmy Carter approach – the turn-down-the thermostat and put on the sweater – that proved fruitless?

I’m not saying conservation is a bad idea; I am saying it is ineffective over the long term. Americans will conserve only as long as money is tight. Once energy prices drop or personal income rises, the house heats up again.

For that reason, today’s energy efficiency movement has distanced itself from the idea of self sacrifice. Instead, advocates define energy efficiency as doing more with less, not doing less. While conservation is a 1970s notion, efficiency is a child of the Internet age, a series of advanced technologies that allow our factories, data centers, homes and appliances to function better while using less energy (with some good old-fashioned insulation thrown in.)

I can only guess that the candidates are using the term “conservation” freely again because polls indicate the American consumer is ready for a period of self-sacrifice – not surprising given all of the bad economic news that seems to stem from a certain amount of financial hubris. But what the polls giveth the polls taketh away. Energy policy based on conservation offers us a fleeting green alternative.

Better that we stay with the efficiency theme.

To that end, it was encouraging this week to see the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy announced state progress in pursuing efficiency policies. (See ACEEE’s “2008 State Energy Efficiency Scorecard” http://aceee.org/pubs/e086.pdf?CFID=17536&CFTOKEN=51038700.) State policy is important because states invest two to three times more money than the federal government in efficiency.

Moreover, efficiency frees up money for investment in other clean energy projects. As ACEEE points out, “Energy efficiency is the only resource that can help states actually reduce energy consumption to combat rising energy demand and create a hedge against skyrocketing energy prices – making efficiency the ‘first fuel’ states can use to balance their energy portfolios.”

Thus, states, utilities and businesses can use money saved through efficiency to build renewable generation and a smart grid. These are solid things that keep saving energy even after the ghosts of Halloween (and election seasons) vanish.

Visit Elisa Wood at www.realenergywriters.com and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.