Sign up | Login with →

energy consumption

New Year's Resolution: Monitor Your Electricity Usage!

January 6, 2012 by Peter Troast
with 338 views
0

First of all, Happy New Year! We're all recovering from a relaxing and, for some of us, pretty exciting holiday break, but we're psyched to be back online and amped up to help all of our readers find new, unique, exciting and effective ways to save energy over the coming year, which we hope you'll all be enjoying in cozy, healthy homes.... [read more]

exclusive

Getting Energy Communication Right for 7 Billion People

November 9, 2011 by Christine Hertzog
with 259 views
0

We marked a milestone on October 31, 2011 by hitting a human population total of 7 billion. Most of the world’s population lives in cities, and nations have been planning to make them as livable, sustainable, and resource-efficient as possible. For instance, China now has more than 220 cities that number over a million inhabitants. Contrast that to the USA, which has 9 cities and 41 urban counties that reach that mark, or Europe which has 35 such population centers. More than 100 Chinese cities including Beijing and Shanghai have signed on to projects to build smart cities – which leverage Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) to build egovernment infrastructures that deliver cost-effective and convenient services to citizens. Smart cities, like Smart Grids, are subsets of the Internet of Things (IoT), and China and Europe have much activity ongoing in forms of policy development, standards development, and actual pilots while the USA lags behind. [read more]

A smart electric network – in more ways than one

June 29, 2010 by Rich Maltzman
with 926 views
0

As we often do here on EarthPM, we are going to combine a couple of pertinent and important themes to hopefully strengthen some points that are key to each of them. The two themes we relate here are: Electric Smart Grids for effective power transmission and reduced carbon footprint High-powered Grids of Smart PMs to gain a bigger... [read more]

Information Privacy in the Smart Grid Age

February 8, 2010 by Christine Hertzog
with 203 views
0

New technologies challenge our ability to manage them.  Do you recall that many users of social networks like MySpace and Facebook were chagrined to discover that their personal information has achieved immortality on the Internet?  In many cases, users failed to appreciate the ramifications of their decisions about sharing... [read more]

OPower, peer pressure and climate change

January 19, 2010 by Marc Gunther
with 207 views
0

We can solve the climate crisis with the right tools–solar panels, wind turbines, electric car batteries, No. 10 envelopes and smiley faces. Envelopes? Smiley faces? Yep. A startup called OPower has learned that by mailing utility customers personalized reports on their energy consumption–and then by comparing them with their neighbors–... [read more]

Bright lines (for living green)

December 3, 2009 by Lou Grinzo
with 175 views
0

Our energy and environmental challenges are complex to the point of being daunting, and sometimes that makes people give up and not take small, readily available steps to reduce their energy consumption, CO2 emissions, and budgets. So let me try to boil this down to a few simple “bright line” questions I can ask the kind of people who I... [read more]

How much energy are you using right now?

November 23, 2009 by Tim Haab
with 86 views
0

One of the problems with energy consumption is that consumers often don't know exactly how much energy they are consuming at a given moment, or how much that consumption is costing.  Typical consumers get a bill at the end of the month reporting total consumption and the total bill.  But efficient energy pricing requires the... [read more]