Understanding and Connecting Smart Meters, Smart Grids, and Smart Markets.
- Lynne Kiesling
October 21st, 2011
Two interesting approaches to using social networking to activate energy conservation. The first, via GreenBiz.com, takes a look at NRDC’s recent decision to join forces with Facebook and Opower to launch a landmark initiative designed to kick energy efficiency up a notch. The second, courtesy of GigaOm, reports on a German start up building a social network around earning energy credits and online shopping.
While the latter has received much less fanfare and will undoubtedly be hampered by its decision to utilize hardware as part of its solution, we believe that its efforts to provide inspiration in addition to information plus a transactive capability makes it much more likely to have tangible potential impact over the long run. Now, given the prevalence and growth of Facebook, it is almost certain that the first app will success from a scale and scope perspective but we only want to ask readers one question: how often do you ask your friends, neighbours, or colleagues how many miles per gallon your car gets? If the volatile and closely watched price of gas is not powerful enough to foster such discussions and contests between associates, will energy savings really do much more without a transactive/remunerative reward at hand?
“…Seizing upon the potential for social networking to influence people’s energy use and behavior, our organizations are working together to launch an application designed to empower people to consume energy more efficiently — in other words, enjoy same level of comfort at lower costs.
The application will be available early next year. The initial set of features will allow consumers to:
• Compare Energy Use to Similar Homes: People will be able to benchmark their home energy use against a national database of millions of homes. All benchmarking will be done on an aggregate level, ensuring complete data privacy.
• Compare Energy Use Among Friends: People will be able to invite friends to compare their energy use against their own, show how energy-efficient they are, and share tips on how to improve.
• Publish Conversations About Energy to the Facebook Newsfeed: People will be able to share information about their energy use, rank, group participation, and tips they’ve completed.
• Group Development — Cooperation and Competition: Communities of people will be able to form teams to help each other achieve collective goals, as well as compete against other groups. Teams will be rewarded and incentivized by their utility or other network partners.
• Automatically Import Energy Data: Customers of participating utilities will be able to import their energy data into the application automatically. (Customers from utilities that are not participating will also have the option to input their energy usage into the app manually.)
We expect today’s announcement will be one of many collaborations we undertake with Facebook in order to help the company meet its sustainability goals.
As a first step, we’re turning to Facebook’s greatest resource, its platform, by empowering people on Facebook to take charge of and improve the way they use energy in their daily lives.
One of our primary goals is to move this nation — our utilities, our businesses and everyday citizens — to cleaner, more efficient energy. That’s an aim we have for everyone we engage with, including Facebook.And it’s a goal our nation is working toward too.
In 2010, the federal government dedicated $5 billion to weatherization in an effort to take advantage of our nation’s energy efficiency potential and create jobs. Never before has our government invested billions of dollars in energy efficiency as we have in recent years.
This initiative is focused on enhancing energy efficiency because it is the first and most cost-effective tool necessary in creating a clean energy economy. And when you enhance efficiency and the transparency around energy consumption and behavior, you empower people to take control of their own energy use and make smart choices about how they utilize it.
NRDC has worked for more than 30 years in partnership with utilities, regulators and their customers to improve energy efficiency and reduce environmental damage from all forms of electricity use. Progressive utilities realize that their role is changing in an era that offers tools like social networking as well as smart grid and metering technologies to enhance the transparency of energy consumption.
Opower has also established itself as a leader in providing software to over 60 utility companies designed to analyze customer energy usage and offer recommendations on how they can save money by making small changes to reduce their consumption. We are pleased that thus far ComEd, City of Palo Alto Utilities and Glendale Water and Power, have committed to working together to engage their customers more directly in this venture, and we anticipate that others will join us.
This will help people cut monthly electric bills while being part of a collective effort to cut pollution at the same time. We hope the 800 million people on Facebook agree.”
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“…Tech companies so far have stumbled when it comes to getting people to be mindful of their energy use and conserve. But a new German startup, Changers, thinks it’s come up with the right incentives to attract the do-gooder crowd: sell mobile solar chargers and build a social network around earning energy credits and online shopping.
Changers, founded in 2010, hopes to build a community and marketplace of eco-conscious users and retailers through shopping and competition. Here’s the proposition: you buy a solar charging kit that, when connected to your computer, will allow you to upload data about the energy generated by the charger and stored in a battery. That data goes to your profile page on Changers’ website, where the energy, measured in watt-hours, will be converted into credits that you can use to buy actual stuff from online shops.
The solar kit charges at a rate of 4 watts per hour and can hold 16 watts in its battery, which can supply power for two iPhones. So you can charge up the battery during the day and then transfer those electrons to your cell phones, tablets or other gadgets at night.
Solar social network
Through your page on Changers, you can track you solar energy generation, the carbon offset created by the solar electricity (2 watt hours of solar electricity equal to 1 gram of carbon emission), and see how you stack up against friends, neighbors or those in other countries. The energy-to-money conversion rate could be different, depending on the retailers, said Hans Raffauf, head of communications at Changers.
The site’s first retailer is Holstee, which sells clothes, bags, coffee makers, sunglasses, ear buds, and other products made from recycled materials. To shop on Holstee, you will have to accumulate a minimum of 100 watts, which gives you a $10 voucher.
While the solar charging kit will cost you $149, joining the Changers community is free. Changers, which has raised an undisclosed seed investment of “a couple of million dollars” from German solar company Centrotherm Photovoltaics, wants to charge retailers in the future, Raffauf said. That won’t happen until Changers builds up a user base large enough to attract more retailers.
And, yes, sharing what your energy production and rewards via Facebook and Twitter is highly encouraged.
Web 2.0 launch
Changers hails from Berlin, Germany, but is launching its site in the U.S. primarily because it wants to start at a place with early technology adopters in order to get feedback and tweak its site. Raffauf said Germany could actually be a larger market – Germans are ahead of Americans when it comes to supporting solar electricity and emission-reduction plans.
Building an active online community isn’t easy. You have to create fun ways for people to interact and offer rewards that people want. And it can’t cost too much money, for while early adopters are happy to shell out big bucks for an iPhone and iPad, they often won’t pay anything for online social circles and web games. The $149 charging kit can therefore be a serious barrier for Changers to attract a big crowd. Raffauf said the company hopes to be able to subsidize the purchases, but it doesn’t have the means to do so now.
Finding the right retailers and enough of them also will be crucial not just for Changers to attract initial users but also to sustain user interest over time. The challenge of sustaining consumer interest has been a big hurdle for many energy management hardware and app developers, some of whom mistakenly thought that consumers would continue to be engaged with their energy management tools. Google and Microsoft, for example, launched energy measuring tools only to pull them earlier this year.
Energy software startup Opower, in partnership with Facebook and the Natural Resources Defense Council, thinks it has come up with something better. Opower plans to launch a Facebook app next year that will let users compare their energy use with their friends and get energy efficiency tips. The goal is to build “the world’s largest social energy community,” and the means involve using games, competitions and Facebook’s already large online user base.
Raffauf believes consumers need more incentives than energy data, games and competitions. “We are able to reward you for your behavior in a monetary way,” he said. “It’s a motivation that will get people to use it.”
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Based on decades of experience and interest in conservation, Monty Simus believes that a truly “smart” grid must be a “transactive” grid, unshackled from its current status as a so-called “natural monopoly.”
In short, an unlocked grid must adopt and harness the power of markets to incentivize individual users, linked to each other on a large scale, who change consumptive behavior in creative ways that drive efficiency and bring equity to use of the planet's finite and increasingly scarce resources.