A major motivation behind smart metering is that giving people information about their energy use leads them to change behavior and reduce energy consumption. An Earth2Tech story highlights the latest development in the field: linking smart metering to online games. The idea is to provide additional incentive for reducing energy use by introducing competition via a points system.
This gives me the opportunity for two personal-point-of-pride plugs.
The first is a precursor to this idea in use at my alma mater, Oberlin College. The school has set up a Campus Resource Monitoring System that displays each dorm’s energy use online — green for below average, yellow for average and red for above average. This allows the dorms to compete with each other to reduce their energy use. The school recently installed indicator lights in dorm lobbies so students can see their dorm’s energy use status as they come and go.
The second is a story by my wife, Kimberly Patch, back in 1993 for PC Week (today’s eWeek) where she started the magazine’s Internet coverage. The story (alas, eWeek doesn’t have stories that far back online) was about the local power utility in the town of Glasgow, Kentucky, which used its cable control network to provide television and Internet services to the community.
The company broadcast the community’s overall power use in real-time on a spare cable channel and found that people changed their behavior; they shifted the times they used energy-intensive appliances to avoid contributing to peak demand. The change was enough that the utility avoided building a new powerplant. Here’s a report (pdf) about the proto smart metering that the utility prepared for the Department of Energy in 1999.