Trillion dollar answer to Bachmann’s light bulb question

By Elisa Wood

March 8, 2012

US Congresswoman Michele Bachmann often asks why government should tell us which kind of light bulb to choose. Turns out it’s a question with a trillion dollar answer.

We will save $1.1 trillion through 2035 because of existing energy efficiency mandates for light bulbs and appliances, according to a report issued this week by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and the Appliance Standards Awareness Project.

“The Efficiency Boom: Cashing In on the Savings from Appliance Standards” says the standards will cut our energy use 200 quads, the equivalent of the US using no energy for two years. The standards already have reduced our energy use 3.5 percent.

This means lighting and appliance standards have saved more energy than almost any other efficiency program, says the report.

Bringing the numbers close to home, the average household will save about $30,000 over 45 years, or enough to cover two years of typical mortgage payments, under existing and new standards. This assumes the household changes major appliances every 15 years.

It’s important to note that Bachmann’s assertion – that the government is choosing light bulbs – is an oversimplification. The standards do not mandate any particular kind of lights, but call for manufacturers to achieve a certain level of energy efficiency. True, an old technology may not make the cut. Oddly, though, no one seems worried about losing access to inefficient air conditioners, computers or other appliances. Anti-standards folks, like Bachmann, seem attached only to inefficient light bulbs. (This bewilders me.)

US appliance standards go back to 1974 when then-Governor Ronald Reagan signed a bill to bring greater efficiency to major appliances in that state. Other states followed, but the federal government didn’t get on board until 1987. Again it was Reagan, this time as President, who signed the first bill. Additional standards became law under President George Bush and President George W. Bush. Since then, the Department of Energy has further updated standards. About 55 products are covered; not only lighting, but also refrigerators, air conditioners, motors and other appliances.

“Standards have been a bipartisan energy policy success story stretching across four decades and five presidencies,” said Andrew deLaski, executive director of ASAP, a coalition of consumer, environmental and efficiency groups.

Home energy devices: Can we bewilder Edison?

By Elisa Wood
Aug. 10, 2011

Why do so many energy insiders insist that home energy automation will fail? Many whom I respect say the typical householder will never take the time to fiddle with smart gadgets that reduce energy costs.

Their skepticism, however, just elicits a verbal shrug from Peter Porteous, CEO of Blue Line Innovations, maker of the PowerCost Monitor, one of the many devices hitting the market to help homeowners manage their energy.

Porteous sees things differently because he spent several years selling products in other industries. Smart energy devices, he says, are really no different than food, automotives or any other consumer item.

“We are no different than any other market. The text book tells it all. First there are the early adopters, and you gradually move through the product lifecycle to where there is mass adoption. Business models evolve, and products evolve, and gradually you make yourself more appealing to a wider segment of the population. There are no surprises here,” he told me by phone this week.

We’ll know soon if he’s right. The company has worked with about 125 utilities on various pilots and projects since it was formed about seven years ago. But it’s not relying solely on that channel to get its product out. Blue Line is testing its ability to thrive in the mass market by offering its energy display monitor directly to consumers in stores like Lowes and Frys.

The PowerCost Monitor’s bragging rights are that it’s relatively cheap (about $100 for a basic model), easy to install (no electrician required), and does not rely on a smart meter. In fact, Porteous says the system works with 90 percent of existing meters, even the old-fashion analog kind. A sensor placed on the home’s meter reads your electricity usage and transmits it wirelessly to a handheld display inside the house. The display shows how much electricity you’re using both in kilowatt-hours and in dollars and cents. A more advanced cloud-based system (about $229) lets consumers slice and dice their home energy use and pinpoint the appliances that are energy hogs. The technology is increasingly moving away from the displays and toward use of cell phones, making it easy to monitor energy usage while away from home.

Porteous also is nonplussed by Google and Microsoft’s recent decision to quit the home energy display market. Skeptics cited the back-to-back departure of the two giants as evidence that smart grid devices have no place in the home. But again Porteous sees the event as a function of a normal market. Smart energy is non-core to Google and Microsoft, and “it is just the natural course of companies in harder times to focus their resources,” he says.

Their departure was something of a blow to Blue Line, since it used the Google and Microsoft applications with its hardware. However, Blue Line was already well on its way to launching a third option offered by People Power when the giants announced they were transitioning out. “The impact was quite minimal,” he says.

So will Blue Line prove that the home energy skeptics are off base? We’ll see. In the meantime, we should probably cut the skeptics some slack. Innovation is new to the electric industry. Those who frequent energy conferences have heard the line many times that while Alexander Graham Bell would be shocked at the changes made to telephones, and barely recognize the technology, Thomas Edison could pretty much pick up where he left off if he were to return today. But if Porteous and his competitors have their way, we’ll have a pair of bewildered ghosts.

What if the light bulb produced more than light?

By Elisa Wood
Aug. 4, 2011

Talk about a light bulb moment.

A professor of engineering at Edinburgh University recently demonstrated for the first time to a wide audience his technology that uses common every day lights to transmit data.

Harald Haas streamed a video through a desk lamp at Ted Global 2011at Scotland’s Edinburgh International Conference Center in July.

If commercialized, the technology not only creates a vast new application for light, but also dramatically expands our now limited wireless capacity. Imagine downloading your email from any of the14 billion light bulbs installed in the world.

Haas’ technology swaps out our current way of transmitting data – through radio frequency – with a new approach using visible light from LED light bulbs. This is significant because we are running out of radio frequency spectrum as our appetite for wireless communication grows, Haas says. The visible light spectrum, on the other hand, is enormous, with about 10,000 times more capacity than radio frequency. Using light instead of radio frequency would give us a lot more capacity for our cell phones, wireless computers and other devices.

The energy implications are even more interesting.

First, the technology creates a new impetus for switching from incandescent light bulbs to LEDs. Until now, LED champions have argued their cause based on the light bulb’s energy efficiency. It’s a good argument, but not one that always motivates the consumer. With Haas’ technology the LED takes on new importance. LED lights are necessary because they contain a semi-conductor; incandescent light bulbs do not.

Second, the whole process of transmitting data through light is more energy efficient than using radio frequency, according to Haas. Think of it this way. We have 1.4 million cellular masts, or base stations, that now allow us to transmit data through our 5 billion cell phones worldwide. These base stations use a lot of energy, particularly for cooling, operating at only a five percent efficiency level, according to Haas. What if instead we transmitted data through the 14 billion light bulbs already installed worldwide? Haas says he’s calculated the “energy budget” and found light-based data transmission to be so efficient, it is virtually free.

“It should be so cheap that it’s everywhere. Using the visible light spectrum, which comes for free, you can piggy-back existing wireless services on the back of lighting equipment,” he says.

The technology offers some other advantages as well, particularly privacy, convenience and health assurances.

Light is more secure than radio waves. Light does not penetrate walls and radio waves do. So it appears that it would much more difficult to hack your calls via light wave than radio wave.

As for convenience, think of how you’re asked to switch off your computer on an airline, so that you don’t interfere with radio signals needed by the plane. If you were instead using the light above your seat to access the Internet, you could keep the computer on.

And last, for electric utilities, light-based transmission would eliminate customer concerns that smart meters placed on homes cause cancer. Industry research has not supported these claims. Nonetheless utility customers in some states, particularly California and Maine, have protested installation of smart meters, themselves an energy efficiency device.

How does Haas’ technology work? It all looks pretty simple. He switches on a desk lamp that uses a $3 LED light. The light beams into a hole to a receiver. The receiver detects small changes made in the light’s amplitude and converts those changes into an electronic signal. Voila! A streaming video, showing flowers opening, appears on a nearby screen. To stop the video, Haas simply passes his hand in front of the light.

Haas hopes to see the necessary microchip fitted into every lighting device: household lights, street lamps, cell phones, overhead lights on planes, traffic lights. Of course, the road to commercialization trips up many potential technologies. And he’s still working on improving data speed. (He has achieved rates of 10 MBit/s per second and hopes to achieve and 100 MBit/s by the end of this year.) But this is one to watch. See his TED talk here.