Tag: electricity

Playing This Online Game Can Help Reduce Your Utility Bills

Posted on by robbie

Forget Candy Crush. A new addictive online game is challenging users to do everyday chores using the least amount of electricity. The premise may seem simple, but the game could have a lasting effect on your life.
Power House, developed by researchers with the aim of getting players to change their energy behavior, asks users to get a family of four to use as little electricity as possible as they move through their virtual home doing tasks like the laundry, making coffee or flushing the toilet. The catch is users have to turn off appliances and lights and cannot move family members through a dark room, which means lights need to be on or the blinds must be pulled up. But if a player uses too much electricity at once, the circuit shorts.
Practicing these behaviors online can change our own household behavior, according to communications scholar Byron Reeves and three Stanford colleagues. The researchers found that people who played Power House behaved in a more energy-efficient manner immediately afterward both in a lab and in their homes, according to Environment and Behavior. 

“Taken together, the experimental and field results demonstrate that energy information embedded in an entertaining game, one that parallels the features and goals of commercially successful applications, can change energy behavior,” they conclude.

The researchers used 40 participants in a lab where five appliances were running, four lights and a computer. Half the participants played Power House while the other played a game focused on time management. After 30 minutes of play, researchers asked them to close up the office without clarifying what that meant. Experimenters found that Power House players were significantly more aware of power than their counterparts, turning off an average of 2.55 of the appliances (compared to .55 appliances for non-game players).

But the group took researcher further and partnered with California utility provider PG&E to tap 51 adults for a second experiment. The participants performed tasks within Power House during 10 game sessions over the course of 17 days with their own energy consumption monitored by PG&E.

In this scenarios, the results were not as impressive: Researchers found a 2 percent decline in household energy use during that period, compared with consumption measures for the previous month.

While it’s not a huge change, the repetition of game tasks could make a difference in our energy usage.

MORE: The Amount of Energy Wasted by Businesses is Astonishing. But This Technology Could Reduce That

How the Garden State Plans to Grow Energy Infrastructure

Posted on by robbie

Following the costly devastation of Superstorm Sandy, the eastern seaboard has spent the last two years picking up the pieces and developing new strategies for disaster preparedness.
The damage serves as a reminder of what natural disaster can do, and the United Nations’s warning that climate change could cost trillions is forcing some states to rethink their plan for infrastructure and energy.
New Jersey joins Connecticut and New York in creating a green bank “to fund projects that will help prevent a reoccurrence of the energy disruptions and build energy resilience.” Both Connecticut (which became the first state to create such a bank in 2011) and New York fund microgrid projects, but New Jersey’s green bank will focus strictly on energy resilience for infrastructure — including water and wastewater plants, hospitals, transit systems and schools, according to Governing.
In New York and New Jersey, 75 percent of power generation is located in flood plains, which have a 1 percent chance of flooding each year, according to United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). An energy resilience bank will support new efforts to create eco-friendly, clean sources of energy that will prove to be more reliable over time. The bank plans to dole out loans and grants to fund projects such as smart grid technology, microgrids and distributed generation, which produce electricity through a variety of smaller energy sources such as solar panels.
The state plans to use $200 million from its Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery allocation from HUD, according to Greg Reinart, director of communications for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. To sustain the bank, the state hopes to attract private-sector financing to invest in new energy technologies and renewable energy.
MORE: Here’s What Happens When Communities Demand Green Energy

Burlington, Vt. is Leading America into a Future of Clean Energy

Posted on by robbie

Vermont’s largest city, Burlington, is illustrating just what a greener future could look like.
The city now touts that 100 percent of its electricity is powered by renewable sources including wind, water and biomass. The Burlington Electric Department reached the notable figure following the purchase of  the Winooski 1 Hydroelectric Facility, located on the Winooski River, earlier this month.
While Burlington’s 42,000 residents have been encouraging electric utility providers to make the switch to greener sources, the city has been talking about achieving the milestone for around a decade. But in 2008, officials began developing an actual strategy.

“The transition in thought from 2004 to 2008 was ‘We want to do this’ to ‘This actually makes economic sense for us to do this,'” says Ken Nolan, the manager of power resources for Burlington Electric.

That “economic sense” means that residents will avoid rate increases, and according to Nolan, once the bonds for the Winooski One facility are paid off (around 20 years from now), the utility will see cost savings.
“A lot of times when you buy plants like this, you end up having to increase rates initially to drop them later,” Nolan tells The Burlington Free Press,  “and we were able to buy it without any impact and then lock in the benefits in the future.”
Of course, there will be instances in which there may not be enough wind and hydro energy to supply the city, which means they may have to generate electricity from traditional fossil fuel sources. But the goal is to amass a surplus of renewable energy when conditions are right — an excess that will be sold to other utilities.
Burlington joins a statewide movement toward ending reliance on harmful fossil fuel sources. The Washington Electric Co-operative, with around 11,000 customers throughout central and northern Vermont, reached 100 percent earlier this year.
The state has set a goal of reaching 90 percent of energy — including heat, electricity and transportation — from renewable resources by 2050. “We’re now in a position where we’re supplying Burlington residents with sources that are renewable,” Nolan says. “The prices are not tied to fossil fuels — they’re stable prices — and they provide us with the flexibility, from an environmental standpoint, to really react to any regulation or changes to environmental standards that come in the future.”
Around the country, more local governments and municipalities are working toward transitioning powering with renewable resources. For instance, after a tornado leveled Greensburg, Kansas in 2007, part of reconstruction included the installation of a 12.5-megawatt wind farm that began generating electricity in excess.
As more cities ponder ways to become greener cities, Burlington is proof that it can — and should — be done.
MORE: The United States’s First Carbon-Neutral City Is…

The United States’s First Carbon-Neutral City Is…

Posted on by robbie

The Silicon Valley city of Palo Alto is already well-known for its tech startups and Stanford University, but did you know it’s also one of the greenest cities in the country?
According to Slate, the northern Californian city is officially the first city in America whose electricity supply is 100 percent carbon-neutral.
Carbon-neutral — which isn’t the same as carbon-free — means the city makes no net release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. About half of Palo Alto’s energy supply is hydroelectric power (which isn’t technically free of fossil fuels), but the city has also purchased renewable energy credits to offset this half of their energy supply, Grist notes. Think of it as offsetting emissions by planting trees.
MORE: This Is What Happens When a County Bands Together to Get Cleaner Power
Going carbon-neutral is not only better for the planet, it’s only costing residents about $3 more a year. Grist reports that Palo Alto will eventually be receiving power from a variety of renewable sources, hoping to meet 23 percent of its energy supply from solar, 11 percent from landfill methane recovery, and 12 percent from wind power by 2017.
So how did Palo Alto unplug itself from the grid? It’s a combination of forward-thinking Palo Altans and the fact that the town is the only one in California that owns all of its utilities. Unlike the rest of the state (that gets its juice from Big Power company PG&E), Palo Alto gets to decide how residents get their gas, water, power and other services, Slate reports.
Last March, the city’s leaders voted for Palo Alto to use only 100 percent carbon-free electricity. “Palo Alto has been a leader in reducing its carbon emissions,“ Mayor Greg Scharff said of the decision, “but when we realized we could achieve a carbon neutral electric supply right now, we were compelled to take action. Climate change is one of the critical challenges of our generation and we hope our actions will inspire others to follow suit.”
Palo Alto has been eco-minded for several years — eventually hoping to run entirely on green power. Slate writes that back in 2007 the city established its “Climate Action Plan” of achieving 33 percent renewable energy by 2015 and ultimately, a carbon neutral electricity supply. Currently, the city is on track to reach 48 percent renewable power by 2017.
DON’T MISS: Cheers to the Nation’s First Sustainable Wine Region
 

The Silver Lining to California’s Terrible Drought

Posted on by robbie

Who knew there would be a bright side to California’s devastating drought? As the sun beats down on the west coast and dries up everything in sight, the state’s solar energy is covering the drop in hydroelectricity, the San Jose Mercury News reports.
Hydroelectricity plants — which are powered by flowing water — provide 15 percent of the state’s electricity. And while California’s recent rainfall was a much-needed break from the state’s drought worries, it wasn’t enough. This is why solar is more important than ever. “Solar not only helps California’s economy and environment, it’s also the smart way to go if you want to conserve water resources,” Solar Energy Industries Association spokesman Ken Johnson told the publication. “Solar panels use almost no water, while nuclear, coal and natural gas facilities can use thousands of gallons per megawatt hour, depending on the technology and the facility.”
MORE: How One City Is Stepping Up to Help Solve Our Fresh Water Worries
With no end in sight to the drought, at least the state has a fantastic source of renewable energy for its electric needs. “We’re going to have enough power to keep the lights on: We are not concerned about blackouts or outages,” Robert Weisenmiller, chairman of the California Energy Commission told the newspaper. “We are much less dependent on hydropower now than we were in the 1940s. In just the last year, we’ve added more than 1,000 megawatts of solar alone.”

How a Jump Rope Could Bring Electricity to the Developing World

Posted on by robbie

In many developing nations, electricity isn’t a guarantee, it’s a privilege. With this in mind, Uncharted Play, a New York-based startup, created the PULSE jump rope, a seemingly simple toy with a big mission: to bring renewable, affordable power to places where electricity is scarce. The PULSE jump rope is made of durable plastic with 3D-printed handles. With each skip of the rope, the device converts the kinetic energy from play into electricity and stores it in the handles for future use. Users can then connect and juice up cell phones, lights or other small gadgets. While the PULSE is currently in beta, with only 100 samples available from the company for $129 each, the company hopes to produce the jump rope at a more affordable price, in order for it to reach the communities it was designed to help.
MORE: $95 Device Lets You Charge Your Phone with Energy from Riding Your Bike