Hot Topics in Energy for 2008
We’ll post a second installment on the Chattanooga/Cleveland comparison next Monday, but today’s news brings two stories of interest to those following the advanced energy markets for 2008 and beyond.
The New York Times today reports on home energy monitoring tools and a demonstration project in the Seattle area that showed how smart metering/monitoring might produce dramatic reductions in energy consumption:
“The results of the research project by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the Energy Department, released Wednesday, suggest that if households have digital tools to set temperature and price preferences, the peak loads on utility grids could be trimmed by up to 15 percent a year.
“Over a 20-year period, this could save $70 billion on spending for power plants and infrastructure, and avoid the need to build the equivalent of 30 large coal-fired plants, say scientists at the federal laboratory.
“The demonstration project was as much a test of consumer behavior as it was of new technology. Scientists wanted to find out if the ability to monitor consumption constantly would cause people to save energy — just as studies have shown that people walk more if they wear pedometers to count their steps.”
In an unrelated story on CNN/Money, Steve Hargreaves reports on the advanced/alternative energy investment outlook for 2008, noting that “investing experts say to stay away from solar, which saw a huge run up in 2007, and instead focus on wind, energy efficiency specialist [as per the NY Times story noted above], or the battered biofuels sector,” all of which bode well for advanced energy efforts here in Northeast Ohio.
You can get the complete CNN/Money story here and the New York Times article here.
January 12th, 2008 at 9:08 am
It’s worth noting that, although the system that the NY Times article talks about is focused on reducing the peak load on the grid, the fact that it’s also giving homeowners access to the data from their smart meters will also bring considerable further energy savings.
Since the smart metering is recording the home’s energy consumption throughout each day, the interval energy data from it is excellent for alerting people to the amount of energy that they consume at different times of the day, perhaps most importantly when they are at work, when they are out, and when they are asleep.
My company makes a software package for businesses to analyze their interval energy data ( http://www.energylens.com/ ). It’s quite amazing how powerful the interval energy data can be for raising awareness of energy consumption, particularly of how much energy is wasted when buildings are closed.
In the domestic sector the data is just as powerful, although of course it’s not so readily available outside of trials such as this one. I suspect the most impressive results will come when this data becomes readily accessible to the majority of households that haven’t really got a clue about how much energy their home uses, and when.