Tag: utilities

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

Why a New Start-Up Is Paying Customers to Save Water

Posted on by robbie

Do you delay opening your utility bills, dreading the monthly expenses? Are you baffled by exactly what all those gallons, kilowatt-hours or cubic feet actually mean?
A start-up called MeterHero wants to simplify all those numbers and encourage you to save by comparing your water, gas and electricity consumption against your neighbors, and then offering rebates to those who conserve more. Earlier this month, the company started returning $1 for every 100 gallons of water a customer saves below their two-year average, TakePart reports.
Although MeterHero’s new refunds may seem small at first glance, the Environmental Protection Agency says the average American family of four guzzles through 400 gallons of water every day. So cutting 40 minutes from your household’s daily shower time or doing larger (yet fewer) loads of laundry means an extra dollar in your bank account. And with 29 percent of the continental U.S. facing drought conditions, it also means huge benefits for the environment.
The idea for the company was sparked at Marquette University in Wisconsin when two dozen students brainstormed how to motivate people to save water. Testing a form of peer pressure, they developed an online platform to compare utility bills. Heavy users would be urged to reduce waste through “the force of friendly competition,” Nathan Conroy, a graduate student involved with the project, tells the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
“As humans, how we compare to others informs our behavior,” Conroy says. “We don’t need everyone to become prophets of water scarcity; we just want people to be empowered to understand their water use and take action that works for them.”
McGee Young, a professor at Marquette, founded MeterHero this year after seeing huge demand for his former students’ work. He said the website is groundbreaking because utilities rarely offer incentives for water conservation since “their revenues depend on using water.”
One thousand users in the U.S. and Canada have registered so far. Anyone with a meter, old utility bills or willing landlord can sign up. MeterHero’s next challenge will be obtaining $100,000 in commitments by early next year — enough to fund rebates for 10 million gallons of water saved. They also have plans to launch a mobile app soon, GreenBiz reports.
“There’s going to be no greater public policy challenge we’ll face in our lifetime than managing increasingly scarce resources in a growing population,” Young says. “That’s why we’re doing this. We have no alternative but to think creatively and outside the box on how to manage our water supplies.”
Source: TakePart

How Utah Stopped a Power Company’s Ridiculous Bid to Tax the Sun

Posted on by robbie

When it comes to embracing the power of the sun, some companies can act like they’re living under a cloud.
That’s what happened in Utah, when utility provider Rocky Mountain Power (RMP) tried to propose a $4.65 monthly fee on homeowners who have solar panels on their roofs to help cover the “fixed” costs of maintaining the power system.
The Deseret News pointed out that Utah could have become the third state — after Arizona and Georgia — to levy this “sun tax” on solar users, even though their homes use less power and even put excess power into to the grid with the energy generated by their panels. The fee would have impacted 2,500 households in the state.
Thankfully, common sense prevailed. After thousands of angry comments and a six-hour public hearing, the Utah Public Service Commission (the state’s utility regulator) rejected RMP’s bid, saying that the power company failed to prove why the fee was reasonable or justified.
MORE: These 10 States Are Leading the Way in Solar Power. What’s Their Secret?
“What a bright day for Utah’s future,” says Sarah Wright, executive director of Utah Clean Energy. “This order protects energy choice in Utah, and recognizes the potential solar has to benefit all Utahns.”
As the Deseret News reports, it’s a win for residents such as Jim French, who invested $21,000 (an amount that was significantly reduced after federal and state tax credits and rebates from RMP) to install solar panels on his Salt Lake City home.
“When we moved to Utah, we became aware that the great majority of power is generated from coal-fired power plants,” French tells the publication. “I wanted to do what little I could to contribute to clean energy.”
ALSO: So Meta: Using the Power of the Sun to Create Solar Devices
However, the fight is definitely not over yet. The AP reports that the utility hopes the commission will revisit the issue. Additionally, everyone else in the state will see their rates go up. On the same day of the commission’s ruling in favor of solar, they also approved a 1.9 percent increase on all residential customers — upping power bills by an average of $1.76 a month. The price hike, will net the utility an astounding $35 million in the next year.
If anything, it’s likely that this increased fee will make more people want to make the switch to renewable energy. With America trying to ditch its reliance on fossil fuels, the forecast for solar looks sunny.
DON’T MISS: This Is What Happens When a County Bands Together to Get Cleaner Power

How San Francisco Got Its Residents to Care About Sewers

Posted on by robbie

After a huge sinkhole opened up in San Francisco’s Richmond District, city officials knew they had to come up with a way to sell residents on a massive upgrade to the city’s outdated sewer systems.
The Sewer System Improvement Program is a 20-year, multi-billion dollar project to update the ecologically unsound and dated treatment plants, while shoring up the whole system from the threat of future earthquakes. But officials at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission worried that a boring PSA wouldn’t be sufficient to communicate the urgency of the undertaking.
In October, the Commission launched a new advertising campaign that used humor to inform San Franciscans about the sewer project. The ads read as notes from the San Francisco Sewer System, and included text such as “Your #2 is my #1,” “No one deals with more crap than I do” and “You can’t live a day without me.” They worked. The Commission’s social media reach has expanded and conversations have started on Twitter and Facebook about making the city’s major watersheds more green. Attendance at the department’s public planning forums is up too, with roughly 80 people attending, and tours of the city’s treatment plants booked months in advance.
“It’s about how you approach the problem, not about how much money you have,” Tyrone Jue, the Commission’s director of communications, told Fast Company. “The advertising campaign, yes, it costs money. [But] it’s a choice every agency has to make, whether you’re small or large. You engage with people in different manners … People want that transparency and openness out of their government; it creates community.”
MORE: How a $300 Million Donation Kept These Classic Artworks in Detroit

With This One Step, Elon Musk Turned SolarCity From a Panel Installer Into a Utility Company

Posted on by robbie

Some industry analysts predict that solar companies will replace utility companies this century. Elon Musk just gave that prediction a lot more credibility. Musk’s solar company, SolarCity, announced that it is on track to raising $54.4 million from private investors. The company has roughly 68,000 signed contracts in the United States. The financial plan is remarkable because it is a first for a solar company; it means, as Fast Co.Exist notes, “SolarCity is financing itself as a utility might.” Other solar companies may soon follow, and soon after, all our roofs will be paved with panels.
Sources: FastCo.Exist
[Image: Araya Diaz/Getty Images for TechCrunch]