see a puffin eat a fish

On top of landing some really cool and interesting clients, GroundedPower was in CNET last week along such heavy hitters as Tendril, Microsoft and Google. Our unique mix of designers, psychologists and ITP world view is really getting noticed!

You can read more here and make sure to check out the image gallery.

Last week I had the privilege of attending my first ever Yahoo! Open Hack event based in Manhattan’s midtown. So many highlights to mention, here are some: Gabe in a spacesuit, Tikva running Ignite, learning about YQL, Clay’s talk and winning the ‘Hack for Good’ prize with my teammates @ramblezeus and @hsbakshi! Go power trio, maker of Powertrends.

We put two concepts out there. One was technology that aggregated real time energy consumption data and presented the data in a town against town contest. The town that saves the most energy gets money to fix potholes. The towns that lose and save less energy know exactly who didn’t pull their weight Secondly, we posed the question, can utilities use social media to predict future consumption trends? We already use Twitter to get our news, can we use indicators of future activity (shows people will watch, events they will attend) to predict electric load? Utilities have an energy storage problem so the more they are right about future load the less dirty plants need to be fired up.

Below are the left over slides for my twenty slide talk. I like them but they are trying to be too clever and they take way too long to read. Wanted to put them up anyway because I like them!

Smart Meter

Smart Appliances

Demand Response

Lord Kelvin Kool-Aid

Smart Meter

My company, GroundedPower announced the release of snapshots yesterday. Our customers are using snapshots to take notes on their energy consumption, compare their usage with others and submit interesting data sets to experts for review. It’s a really neat way to keep track of how far you’ve come in energy savings and see how your appliance usage changes through the seasons. Does the fridge cycle less when there’s more food in it? Does your water heater cycle less in the summer? Does your water heater use more or less energy than other people’s? What’s that weird spike at 4 in the morning? All of these questions and more are being answered using the snapshot tool. Here’s one of mine:

These are the kinds of interactions that are possible when real time consumption data is available. For example, uou can turn on all of your lights in the house, take a quick snapshot and then send your family members a bill for how much they are costing you when they don’t turn off the lights A level of timely interaction is lost with day behind or even 15 minute interval data.