The Word on another type of Power

by | Jan 8, 2007 | Uncategorized

A followup to my post last night about the effect of “watching the meter” on power consumption. Today’s NYT ran a front page story on a project in Chicago to give rate payers hourly electricity cost information. According to the article, those in the program are using less energy at peak times reducing overall peak energy demand and decreasing their electricity bill. Research suggests that shifting 7% of energy consumption to offpeak hours could reduce energy expenditures by $23 billion, or approximately 1/12th for the average household (that’s a free month!) CORRECTION: The following comment came through email from David Cay Johnston at the NYT: That Carnegie Mellon savings estimate of $23 billion per year by cutting peak power usage just 7% means much more than a free month each year for each household. The estimate is for the nation. Industrial, commercial, government and nonprofits — all would get 12 months of popwer for the price of 11. Consumers are used to peak pricing in other aspects of life, as the article says, we make long personal calls via cell phone at night when the calls are free, we fly during offpeak hours, and some people will drive off peak to spend less on tolls. Empowering rate payers with hour by hour pricing is an immediate way of reducing peak load. Every power utility should offer a daily pricing report to their rate payers via web, email and...

NYT on conservation and solar energy

by | Jan 8, 2007 | Uncategorized

This was an interesting week in the New York Times. Thursday’s House and Home featured a cover story about home solar (photo voltaic) installations mostly in NY and California where tax incentives encourage home owners to add solar panels. Saturday’s business section featured a front page article about Japan’s energy conservation. In Japan the average household uses half of what the average American house hold uses anualy in electricity measured in KW hours. They have electricity meters that help them actually guage how much energy they are using. Imagine if you could log in to your home energy system and see the fluctuations in your energy uses? Or if that spinning meter was in your kitchen rather than outside in the back of the house… I am sure it would modify behavior. Then there were a handful of articles about Gerald Ford, apparently he was the first conservation president. Even before Carter put solar panels on the white house, Ford instituted a $3 per barrel oil import tax (oil was about $11 a barrel back then) and called for greater energy independence. But then today, on the front page of the Sunday Week In Review there was an article about fluorescent light bulbs and Wal-Marts big push on CFLs for home use. I was just talking to my father about it, he is committed to replacing at least 3 bulbs in his house with CFLs. Last month, I replaced nearly every bulb in my Seattle apartment with CFLs. But this article sent exactly the wrong message which was “Fluorescent lighting is ugly and not as nice as incandescent bulbs.”...

We-Think: another “open source” book

by | Jan 7, 2007 | Uncategorized

I just read of Charles Leadbeater’s book project, We-Think on World Changing. Leadbeater and his publisher have pre-released his book about new forms of collaboration and organization. From the introduction: The basic argument is very simple. Most creativity is collaborative. It combines different views, disciplines and insights in new ways. The opportunities for creative collaboration are expanding the whole time. The number of people who could be participants in these creative conversations is going up largely thanks to the communications technologies that now give voice to many more people and make it easier for them to connect. As a result we are developing new ways to be innovative and creative at mass scale. We can be organised without having an organisation. People can combine their ideas and skills without a hierarchy to coordinate their activities. Many of the ingredients of these forms of self-organised creative collaboration are not new – peer review for example has been around a long time in academia. But what is striking about Wikipedia, Linux, Second Life, Youtube and many more is the way they take familiar ingredients and combine them to allow people to collaborate creatively at mass scale. And this is, in many respects, right where we at CivicActions are: the intersection of technology, collaboration, media, empowerment… 2007 is going to be a very interesting and exciting...

War Driving, WiFi and Packet Sniffing

by | Jan 5, 2007 | Uncategorized

At CivicActions we know all about open WiFi networks, and I often get asked by friends about “internet security” and specifically, how secure their activities are when they are on open networks. David Pogue covered the issue in his column today. While he believes his wifi traffic is not worth snooping (“Frankly, I consider the details of my life so boring to other people that I really couldn’t care less. I’ve got nothing to hide, so why not accept it?”) he disabused his readers of any notion that their WiFi traffic was generally safe from snooping eyes. It’s a good column to send to friends and family who might just make a new years resolution to make stronger passwords, or stop sending secur information in unencrypted emails, or not know what the little lock icon...