Going Green
dan tynan on Apr 06 2008 at 12:34 pm | Filed under: US Airways Magazine, environmental
Global climate crisis? Technology can help.
(A slightly different version of this appeared in the April 08 issue of US Airways Magazine.)
by Dan Tynan
Al Gore I am not. But I do what I can to leave a lighter carbon footprint on the world – recycling religiously, replacing our incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, and nagging my kids to turn off their computers and take shorter showers.
Yet I still spend big chunks of each day walking around the house shutting off lights and cranking down the heat. Someday, with the help of green technology, I won’t have to.
Today green tech is mostly a tiny island of hope surrounded by an ocean of hype. But if we’re going to reverse global climate change before the polar bears run out of ice, technology will need to play a big role.
In many ways the green tech revolution has already begun. In Northern California a company called Agilewaves is wiring homes with gear that measures total energy consumption at the source. By placing sensors on every major electrical circuit, water pipe, and HVAC conduit, Agilewaves can show you how much power you’re consuming in each room. Log on to your home’s Web-based dashboard and you can see what it’s costing you every hour, day, week, month, or year.
The first step is to provide consumers with information to make smarter choices about their energy use, says Agilewaves CEO Peter Sharer. Step two is to network homes together, so you can track consumption by street, neighborhood, and community. Step three is to work together to reduce our collective carbon addiction.
Power companies are also keenly interested in helping consumers manage energy consumption and costs. Over the next five years Southern California Edison plans to install five million “smart meters” that can be controlled remotely over a wide-area wireless network. SCE will be able to detect outages for each home and turn the power on or off without ever rolling a truck, says Paul De Martini, director of the Edison SmartConnect program. Homeowners who choose to participate in the program will be able to view their power consumption on a secure Web page.
Smart meters will also connect to home networks using ZigBee, a wireless technology found in many new lighting and household appliances. At last January’s Consumer Electronics Show, home automation vendor Control4 demonstrated a ZigBee-based system that connects to a smart meter and, at the customer’s request, selectively shuts things off when power use exceeds certain levels. For example, you can tell the system to turn off the upstairs lights first, then the plasma TV, and then the AC, until you reach the optimal energy savings.
The key is making energy management as painless as possible, says John Yoon, Control4’s vice president of marketing. “Americans want to do the right thing, they just don’t want to be inconvenienced,” he says. “That’s the beauty of automation – it’s the technological equivalent of curbside recycling.”
For the short term, however, it’s a lot more expensive to automate your home than it is to drag your cans to the curb. Retrofitting a house with Agilewaves-style sensors starts at $4,000 and can easily exceed $20K. A bare-bones Control4 setup starts at $2,000 and heads north in a hurry when you add lighting and home entertainment gear.
But utilities in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, and Texas are looking at similar schemes. As more homes adopt these systems the costs will drop, and new homes will come with their smarts built in. Sensors in your floors and walls will detect when no one’s using a room and adjust their settings accordingly. Your house will go to sleep when you leave for work in the morning and wake up when your car hits the driveway.
Let’s just hope the green revolution comes sooner rather than later. Gore knows we all need to do our part – before the lights go out for good.
