Did you resolve to use less energy for your home appliances in 2008? In a study released yesterday, a lab within the the US Department of Energy found that lots of Americans (or at least lots of Pacific Northwesterners) want to do the same – and given more information, tools, and sophisticated market incentives, they’ll actually do it. To the tune of 15% less peak power use and 10% lower household electric bills.
The report describes a test project by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (press release, fact sheet PDF). The New York Times explains that the project
was as much a test of consumer behavior as it was of new technology. Scientists wanted to find out if the ability to monitor consumption constantly would cause people to save energy — just as studies have shown that people walk more if they wear pedometers to count their steps.
In the Olympic Peninsula, west of Seattle, 112 homes were equipped with digital thermostats, and computer controllers were attached to water heaters and clothes dryers. These controls were connected to the Internet.
The homeowners could go to a Web site to set their ideal home temperature and how many degrees they were willing to have that temperature move above or below the target. They also indicated their level of tolerance for fluctuating electricity prices. In effect, the homeowners were asked to decide the trade-off they wanted to make between cost savings and comfort.
Also key was linking of electricity prices to demand by “a sophisticated live marketplace…. Every five minutes, the households and local utilities were buying and selling electricity, with prices constantly fluctuating by tiny amounts as supply and demand on the grid changed. ‘Your thermostat and your water heater are day-trading for you,’ said Ron Ambrosio, a senior researcher at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M.” (New York Times), which designed the projects’s software.
The day-trading system encouraged conservation specifically at times when electricity was being guzzled from the power grid, reducing peak power use. In effect, rapidly fluctuating prices buffered demand, so the power company had less need to ramp their generators up and down, which is inefficient and costly.
A partner project in a separate set of homes installed controls that briefly switched appliances off when the electrical grid was most stressed; similar devices implemented widely could cut US household power use by 20%, said the report. And the online personal power-use stats have this social networking addict craving a Facebook badge that reports her current wattage to pump up her green street cred. Too bad most electricity providers are nowhere near ready to roll out these technologies.
What is ready for use in new year’s resolutions is the compact fluorescent light bulb. If you’re feeling reluctant to replace your cozy yellow incandescents with the sometimes ghastly white fluorescents, your government may be planning some motivation. Manufacture and sale of incandescent bulbs will be come illegal in the EU in 2009 (and the Guardian’s Lionel Shriver says he’s already hoarding them). In December, Bush signed into law a more leisurely six-year phaseout timetable for the US. Among the individual US states, progressive California has already seen a proposal to ban incandescents – which went down in flames last year.
Fortunately, a few models of fluorescent bulb did cast a glow that warmed the hearts of testers at the New York Times. Here’s to finding the rays of environmental hope in 2008.
Anna Barnett
Photos: energy meter, Goombay; bulb, Piccolo Namek.
