Via E&E Publishing, an interesting article on the federal Green Button initiative and how “…utilities have smartphone-style dreams for ‘smart grid’…” I say “interesting” because it just continues to emphasize the industry and government’s failure to understand that information in and of itself – without a transactional capability and motivation system – is simply not compelling and will not drive significant changes in behavior. The words and figures below are striking: “… in 10 months, out of 2.2M potential users, 100,000 have downloaded the information..”;. “People that have the same eagerness to use an app for banking might have it for energy…” Might? Is this what we’re building the future of customer engagement on? Perhaps we could again consider giving people a reason to care about their utility data and provide an incentive for them to watch, use, and capitalize on it. Smart markets anyone?
Everything seemed to click this year for Green Button, the new data format that San Francisco-based Pacific Gas and Electric Co. created to help customers track their energy use.
The White House endorsed it. Dozens more electric utilities signed up to use it. Software developers quit their day jobs to design energy apps that put the data to good use.
The goal is to turn Green Button into a bustling online marketplace like the ones that Internet giants such as Apple Inc. and Google Inc. have created for their cellphones and tablets. To get there, though, will take a few more clicks.
PG&E, which launched Green Button 10 months ago, has 2.2 million potential users in the customers who have registered for the online service that lets them collect the data. But they have downloaded it only a little more than 100,000 times, despite the fact that PG&E has installed about 9.4 million digital electric meters, more than any other U.S. utility, and serves customers that are friendlier than most to conservation and cutting-edge computing.
The company hopes that a new offering called Green Button Connect will make the new software more attractive by letting customers use it without downloading a spreadsheet. It’s a similar approach to that of Mint.com, which lets people track their finances without having to jump from website to website, said Karen Austin, the longtime retail executive who launched Green Button after becoming PG&E’s chief information officer last year.
“People that have the same eagerness to use an app for banking might have it for energy,” she said during a recent interview.
Within the next few years, these energy apps will become available to about 36 million electricity customers as 35 utilities follow through on promises to use Green Button.
Some of the nation’s largest utilities are on board, among them Chicago-based Commonwealth Edison Co. and Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric Power Co. So are some small providers, such as Georgia’s Sawnee Electric Membership Corp. and Idaho’s Kootenai Electric Cooperative Inc., which have just 3,000 residential customers between them.
But even the people who are designing apps for the new platform wonder whether how effectively energy software will be able to piggyback on the rise of the smartphone.
Businesses and building owners, highly attuned to the bottom line, are already downloading Green Button data and using specialized software to save energy and money, said Craig Isakow, the founder and CEO of a Washington, D.C., startup called Melon Power, which recently won a $15,000 prize in a federal competition for new energy apps.
Among homeowners, “I think it still might be just for the energy geeks for a while,” Isakow said. “I’ve downloaded my data, but I don’t know if my neighbors have.”
The new Energy Star
For the past year, White House officials have tried to turn Green Button into a cousin of the 20-year-old Energy Star program, another voluntary program that companies can join to support efficiency without new laws and regulations.
Earlier this month, the administration gathered hundreds of people at the White House for the “Energy Datapalooza,” an event where Cabinet officials and business leaders spoke about the promise of software that helps people understand and control their energy use. They also honored the winners of the Apps for Energy competition, in which Melon Power placed second.
The grand prize, worth $30,000, went to a Seattle startup called Leafully.
Leafully’s founders started the company after leaving their jobs as engineers for Microsoft Corp.’s search engine, Bing. The timing of their departure was ironic because just last year, both Microsoft and Google scrapped projects aimed at gathering home energy data and turning it into useful software.
The main reason that Microsoft’s program, called Hohm, didn’t work out was that utilities kept their data in different formats. Launching the product nationwide would have meant writing new code for almost every utility, and there’s no economy of scale in that, said Timothy Edgar, one of the co-founders of Leafully.
“It was difficult to have a custom solution for every utility and work with every utility,” he said during an interview. “Having a standard like Green Button solves that problem.”
Leafully heavily borrows from the design of Mint.com, using charts to help average people visualize their energy use. One of the charts shows users how many trees they would need to plant to make up for the carbon emissions associated with their energy use.
While Leafully mainly focuses on homeowners, Melon Power focuses on businesses. Isakow, a veteran of the Department of Energy and energy services company Johnson Controls Inc., compares his application to tax software such as TurboTax.
Rather than hiring a consultant or filling out forms online, businesses can plug their Green Button data into Melon’s software and figure out their score on the 100-point Energy Star scale, a number that cities such as New York, Washington and San Francisco are starting to make building owners disclose to prospective tenants and the broader public.
Those laws still aren’t very common, and building owners aren’t always crazy about them, but there are some signs that they may nudge people to use less energy. According to data released earlier this month by U.S. EPA, energy consumption dropped by an average of 7 percent between 2008 and 2011 across the 35,000 buildings that consistently checked their score over that time.
Melon Power’s name is an homage to a quote by Energy Secretary Steven Chu. People often refer to energy efficiency as “low-hanging fruit,” but Chu has described it as even easier to achieve — “fruit that is lying on the ground,” like a melon.
Slow-moving utility industry
During his speech at the Energy Datapalooza earlier this month, Chu told the audience that dream is starting to become a reality.
“Already with this Green Button initiative, we’re seeing utility companies allow you to have an app, like an iPhone app,” he said. “Or, I guess, to be fair, you should say it could also be a [Samsung] Galaxy app or a BlackBerry app.”
It wasn’t delivered as a joke, but several people in the auditorium snickered. As the New York Times recently reported, some people who consider themselves tech-savvy look down on Research in Motion Ltd., the maker of the BlackBerry, for allowing its share of the smartphone market to plunge from 50 percent three years ago to 5 percent today.
That in itself was a sign of how fast the telecommunications industry can be turned on its head. By comparison, the utility industry barely seems to move from year to year.
The two sectors are similar in many ways. Created at roughly the same time, they are both reliant on infrastructure. Both were run by regulated monopolies through most of their first century, serving customers ranging from huge corporations to families.
But despite their similarities, they have moved along very different paths, said Rick Boucher, a 14-term Democratic congressman from Virginia who crafted both telecommunications and energy laws before falling to a Republican challenger in 2010. He now leads the government strategies group at Sidley Austin LLP, where he has clients in both industries.
“Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison were more or less contemporaries, but if they came back today you can imagine the very different reactions they would have to the progress of their respective inventions,” Boucher said.
“What started as a telephone has now become the Internet. The electrical system still is the same basic business model that Thomas Edison envisioned at the very beginning — all the same core technologies. It hasn’t changed that much. But now we are seeing intelligence added … and that modernization is, in my mind, long overdue.”
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