Making Home Energy Management Work

By Joe Polastre Friday July 22, 2011

Energy Efficiency
Making Home Energy Management Work

Over the past few years, I’ve been an avid consumer of home-based energy monitoring solutions.  I fit in that 1% of actual consumers that will invest in energy monitoring and management but don’t have any clear ROI.  These are gadgets for these sake of gadgets, but I have a intense curiosity to know what’s actually going on in my house (and what stochastic process are at play!).  I have TED and Ploggs and have followed the Berkeley ACME project and other home-build solutions (ala: instructables.com).

First, the results.  I travel quite a bit, and that means most of my energy savings is actually from finding the optimum configuration of my appliances while I’m away.  I was averaging about 500 Watts when I started using TED.  But now my steady state “away” power consumption is 150 Watts.  That’s a savings of $30 per month if I’m traveling the whole time.  Not groundbreaking, but enough to pay for my monitoring devices in less than a year.  Add to that the fact that PG&E keeps giving me rebates for “cutting consumption during peak winter periods.”  In the last 6 months, that’s resulted in a $25 Visa gift card and a $30 bill rebate.  Not bad, about $80 in PG&E bill savings plus $55 in incentives, or $135 savings over a 6 month period.

Despite these fine results, why hasn’t home energy management and monitoring taken off?  Why has Google PowerMeter shut its doors? Why was Microsoft Hohm shut down last month?

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Google’s Android Hubris

By Joe Polastre Wednesday June 8, 2011

Software
Google’s Android Hubris

Oracle has launched a major lawsuit against Google’s Android for infringing upon Sun’s Java IP. As someone who was formerly strong-armed into licensing Java by Sun, I know first hand how seriously Oracle (formerly Sun) took Java IP. They couldn’t figure out any other way to make money from Java, so some lawyers came up with the idea of suing anyone who appears to be infringing on Java’s licensing terms, bytecode compiling/packing, and bytecode interpreter.

Enter Android. A startup company started by the former founders of Danger. You may remember Danger from the Sidekick sold at T-Mobile. Or from Paris Hilton’s Sidekick being famously hacked (technically it was the T-Mobile instance of the Danger server that was hacked) and all of her contacts spilling out. It was an operating system built on Java, and had the equivalent of a Blackberry Enterprise Server years before Blackberry had thought of the idea.

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Get it together, California!

By Joe Polastre Monday October 18, 2010

Data Centers
Get it together, California!

To continue in the theme of what the government is doing to make their data centers more efficient, let’s now focus on the state of California. In February of this year, Governor Schwarzenegger signed Executive Order S-03-10 which dictates efficiency goals for the state’s data centers. Similar to EO 13514, the goal is to bring the state’s data centers in line with commercial best practices thereby reducing cost to the state and providing environmental/GHG benefits.

Due to the fact that the state spends more than $3 billion annually on IT and 40% of office energy costs spent on IT, an energy efficiency and consolidation plan was put into place. First, the Office of the CIO (OCIO) was created to centralize IT management. The OCIO gets the ultimate word on all IT policy, with each department contributing through newly appointed CIO’s (called Agency CIO’s).

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Silver Spring doesn’t care about Arch Rock

By Joe Polastre Friday September 3, 2010

Startups
Silver Spring doesn’t care about Arch Rock

Cisco announced their intention to buy wireless sensor maker Arch Rock.  With this acquisition comes Arch Rock’s technology, a spin out from UC Berkeley.  The technology is around mesh networking, where every device can talk to each other and work collaboratively “bucket brigade style” to deliver data to far away places.  While the technology is very cool (and complicated… I used to work on it at UCB), Arch Rock was never able to find a business niche.

While Arch Rock had great technology, the business model was never formalized — Arch Rock routelinely messaged the “Internet of Things“, a vague concept where every device is connected to the Internet.  In contrast, Silver Spring focused hard (think “crossing the chasm“) and aimed to be the network platform provider to the smart grid.  They established firm OEM partnerships and secured early adopter utility companies.  Arch Rock, on the other hand, was still wading through a variety of market verticals and never got the chance to focus on the smart grid sector.  It was a classic case of a technology in search of a solution.

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Ice is Cool

By Joe Polastre Thursday August 26, 2010

Green Buildings
Ice is Cool

While it may seem like a silly obsession, I have been enthralled by the simplistic notion of ice energy storage. I generally subscribe to the KISS principal, and you’d be surprised how often I get in heated debates at work and at conferences about how the best solution is the simplest solution.

The whole idea of freezing ice in the evening when power is cheap and then melting the ice during the day is so simple it is brilliant. It isn’t very different to when one of Sentilla’s founders, Rob Szewczyk, observed that you can compute how much energy any piece of equipment is using (from washing machines to computers) if you know how much work it is doing.

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Power IT Down!

Energy Efficiency
Power IT Down!

To raise awareness of the impact of IT energy consumption, Friday August 27 is “Power IT Down Day“.  The idea is this — turn off your laptops, desktops, monitors, printers, and anything you’re not using for the weekend. Printers alone are estimated to be 12% of the IT cost in 2012 (8% in 2007).  The [...]

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Obama’s Climate Bill for Gov’t Data Centers

Data Centers
Obama’s Climate Bill for Gov’t Data Centers

In October, 2009, President Obama issued an Executive Order (EO 13514) that set federal energy efficiency standards.  EO 13514 superceeds the previous executive order put in place by President Bush (EO 13423) from 2007.  While the previous order required the government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 3% per year, totaling at least a 30% [...]

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Podcast on YII

Startups
Podcast on YII

I had a lot of fun recording a podcast with Anne Swift for Young Inventors International.  We talked about what it takes to start a company, some thoughts about when to raise venture capital (and when NOT to raise venture capital), and some resources to get other entrepreneurs started. Anne is an entrepreneur herself, hailing [...]

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Monitoring is not Management

Data Centers
Monitoring is not Management

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the difference between monitoring and management.  This week, I received an email with the title “Revolutionizing Energy Management”.  Interesting, I wonder what management solution this company provides for energy.  The content of the email went on to talk about a brand new meter that provides real time [...]

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Interconnected & Coordinated Transportation

Transportation
Interconnected & Coordinated Transportation

While I was in London, enjoying my time stranded across the pond due to the ash cloud, I had the pleasure of having dinner with Keith Dierkx.  Keith is an old colleague and IBM-er who was tasked with running the IBM Rail Innovation Center in China.  In case you haven’t heard, China is investing somewhere [...]

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Top 5 Myths about Google’s Data Centers

Data Centers
Top 5 Myths about Google’s Data Centers

There are many rumors and perspectives about Google’s data centers touted by data center operators, executives, media, and analysts.  I’d like to clear up a number of myths or inaccuracies about Google’s operations.  This is based on my own experience, discussions I’ve had with Google employees, and interaction with well-known experts in the data center [...]

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Three Steps to Data Center Management

Data Centers
Three Steps to Data Center Management

Modern data centers are complex beasts; with a variety of appliances running across a multitude of hardware configurations and physical layouts, they are the product of years of expansion and growth. One of the first things I ask customers is what management tools they are using. There’s always a laundry list, some open-source (like Nagios) [...]

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Sustainability in an Ash Covered Reality

Sustainability
Sustainability in an Ash Covered Reality

Like thousands of other people, I’m “stranded” in London trying to figure out when I’ll get back to San Francisco. I’ve been annoyed by the way this “crisis” has been described to the rest of the world.  Yes, a volcano is errupting.  And yes, it will continue to do so for a while. Some flights [...]

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