Social energy meters

"If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it."

— Lord Kelvin

This quote is central to a range of services that enables the concious energy consumer. The services build upon the activities of measuring, organizing and sharing your private energy consumption data. Originally this activity was done to keep you energy bills at bay, but today this is emerging as a collective effort to reduce global impact of greenhous gases. Statistics inform us that accsess to home energy information results in savings of 5-15% on the energy bill with comparable savings for the environment.

Google Power Meter - focus on display & share

Google recently announced through google.org an initiative for the collection, organization and utilization of domestic energy consumption through Google Power Meter. Although they are not the first, it is worth noticing when the one of the biggest companies on collection, organization and utilization of data enters this field. With partners such as GE (selling fancy smart grids), Google gears up to push policy makers towards open data formats and information flow to enable competition.. Pros: Huge reach that, if sucsessfull, will have an impact.
Cons: Is everything going to be on googles hands?

CurrentCost - focus on measure, display (and share)
At home in UK CurrentCost looks to be one of the more successful after market energy monitors. It is also "hacking" friendly by including means of outputting the data in a readable format for sharing. Pros: Commercial availability is good. Easy to use. Many users. 
Cons: Feels a bit too specific for the UK

Wattson by DIY Kyoto - focus on measure, display and share
This enegy meter is sold with a personality and a much more louder "i'm doing something good for the environment" statement. It looks like a flipped shelf and is quite radical compared to CurrentCost, but might not be as intuitive as the CurrentCost device. The visual identity helps building this brand. There seems to be some issues with the companion software called Holmes that have enabled a paralell software and community.Pros: Designerly approach based on awareness rather than cost/kW/h principles. Open.
Cons: Ease of use and accsess to data seems to be obscured by the design philosophy.

Power Squid - focus on measure and sharing
A Norwegian initative by Origo that aims to measure, organize and share data though it's website. Basically they try to find the cheapest way to do it by just directly upload the information from the current sensor to the web and circumvent the local, presumably costly, display device. And they share their progress in a Do It Yourself friendly format.Pros: Trying to be cheap and ubiquitous.
Cons: Some way to go before it is commercial.

Pachube - focus on sharing
I bumped into Pachube while doing my resarch. It is a sensor sharing API/Community. If you have a sensor online, you can share it at Pachube and the sum of sensors are available through The Pachube API to manipulate and use as you whish! Connecting your washing machine to twitter can be done through Pachube: "Miele @la-zy im am done washing for you!" Pros: The Internet Of Things is here!
Cons: What to do with all the feeds?

I would like to hear from you if you know of any more social power meters or if you have experience with such systems. 

The SunCat Batteries - DIY prototypes

Rechargeable Batteries with Solar Cells
Project by Knut Karlsen



At home i always have some batteries lying around, either rechargeable or normal ones. Usually they are empty, but i'd like them to be always fully charged. I could use a normal charger and there is a lot of solar devices that charge rechargeable batteries. I wanted it simpler; why hasn't anyone made a battery with integrated solar cells? The idea of the "SunCat" batteries where born. The batteries should just bask in the sun like a cat and left for a while, in a sunny window, they would slowly recharge.

Prototypes
During my research for my diploma i was in touch with scientists at IFE that experimented with the production of flexible solar cells. They where kind enough to send me some samples in the right dimensions that i could use for the prototypes (full set at flickr):



I had some older NiMH rechargeable batteries that i glued the flexible Photo Voltaic (PV) cells onto. The PV cells are rated at 1.8V and the batteries are 1.5V so they match quite well.



Half glued you can see the really shiny polymer substrate backside of the PV cell. The crude written text says: 3x0,6V B: 13.411.09 Which i guess is the voltage and a batch number.



Using a conductive silver pen and some flat wires from a broken canon lens I made an ok connection to the PV cell.

This setup is infact a (quite weak) trickle charger. It is not ideal, but really convenient. A second version would have some electronics (to check when full) and capacitors to charge the batteries more efficiently, but the battery would then be smaller if it all needs to fit within a C-cell battery.



The sun did not shine today, infact it was snowing. But i'll sure let them hang around in my window and take some more pictures when the sun shines.

Interviews and concept development

Going through my notebook i've started to weed out some concepts. As of now they are rather unorganized, but they range from rather technical to "design for discussion" projects. I'll detail them shortly.
I will shortly arrange a workshop to elaborate more on the concepts. A goal here should be to focus the concepts into maximum three directions.

I'm also going through a round of interviews with families with different backgrounds. They are not complete or written in a useful format yet, but they are available from my skydrive here:

What have i learnt?
Based on just the three first interviews it is clear that knowledge and experience with renewable energy is very varied amongst the subjects. The different backgrounds leads to different motivation that have a big impact on their thoughts regarding renewable energy. In daily life unplugging leads and switching off lights seems to be a common trait. Again, the focus on lighting as an environmental culprit is a bit strange in regard of its low percentage of domestic electricity end usage.

Sustainable power is unsustainable

A recent article on newscientist.com sheds some light upon an issue with renewable energy. Various technological innovations are regulary presented as magic bullets that will change our energy production. The article by Colin Barras explain how quite a few rare and non renewable resources are part of this technology and if adapted at a large scale the technology could actually deplete some reseources quite fast. Indium and Platinum are used as examples in this case.

After doing quite a bit of research on the technology and politics there is not that many places one does find critique of this field, though size of installations in nature is a common debate. I have mentioned it in previous articles on this blog, that critique of both old and new paradigms within any field of work are extremly important to innovation. Innovations in renewable energy are often hyped like magic bullets. The result is a Sci-Fi impression of a white and sustainable future. But again, as the article touch upon, the technology itself might not be sustainable at a larger scale.

I Switch

I was working on a concept on switches when i decided to look into switches i press daily at home. Took some pictures to see if i could use them for something. Never mind the grime and dust :)

Danish interaction design

Found this at core77. It is a collection of works from students at the Danish Design School presented in an edible format. AHO should do something similar!

Limited resources

Just to add to the previous post on concepts: The limited electrical supply could be generated by a community wind turbine. What is the front end for the inhabitant of individual appartments in this configuration?

Green actions from engaging interfaces

"A green action is something you do to reduce your environmental footprint".

I have found a couple of examples that points to the direction where i believe designers can contribute with key knowledge to facilitate green actions. The right information at the right time might enable you to choose the green action over the unsustainable action in the moment of the deciscion.

Prius consumption monitor

from Boulder to Detroit 529
Originally uploaded by this user

The image of the screen displaying "Consumption" in a Toyota Prius is a good example for a system that display relevant information in the moment of action. The information encourages you to choose the greener action by visualizing the reward you would get by reducing your "pedal pressure". The reward in this case is more miles per gallon (MPG), which is a common parameter for comparing how economical a car is to drive. The screen also display how you are doing on a longer timescale by plotting data from the last 30 minutes. This seems to be enough encouragement, at least for this driver, to adapt a MPG optimized driving routine.

/update - Honda Insight which will compete against the Prius also sports an interface that encourages economical driving.

"The Personal Well-Tempered Environment"
Dan Hill, who operates City of Sound, has outlined a concept (blog|video) where information is the main driver for doing greener actions in our daily life. The idea is to collect all relevant information on consume and contribution of energy at home and sharing the data. This enables realtime resource mapping at an individual level, up to the neighbourhoood community and even city level. Information from this mapping, shown at the relevant point of descision, could change behaviour at many levels in a society.

The concept is convincing when sketched into the context of a home. Information displayed at action points could have an impact on consume. Collected into an API for buildings the concept connects to a larger social context that might impact citywide behaviour. In his video presentation Dan argues that the dashboard idea is a bit "geeky" and would rather have information in a tangible format outside of a screen. Dan raises a few concerns when inserting a lot of information into our daily life. Will it be stick or carrot? How can it be designed to inform without creating stress or moralize?

This is at the core concerning that given the right information at the right time people would choose the greener action.