Sustainable IT | Ted Samson » Ambient Orbs spark bright idea for cutting energy waste

July 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Ambient Orbs spark bright idea for cutting energy waste

TAGS: Energy conservation

Clive Thompson over at Wired has shared an intriguing story about how Mark Martinez, demand response manager of Southern California Edison, got 120 customers to reduce energy consumption by 40 percent during peak periods. He gave them Ambient Orbs, small spheres that you can place on your desk and that light up and change colors in response to changing streams of data.

Thompson notes that these balls of joy were first marketed to individuals for monitoring stock performance. If the orb is blue, all is well; when red, it's time to consider quickly buying or selling.

Rather than receiving Nadsaq data, these orbs as configured by Martinez feed off data about electric rates for SCE customers -- rates that go up, of course, as demand swells. So when Martinez's orb recipients see their balls flashing red, they know that it's a good time to power down where possible (for example, adjust the thermostat, turn off excess lights, and so on).

It really is an elegant solution, as Thompson observes, providing a quiet yet constant reminder about electricity costs. It's all too easy to forget or take for granted that for every minute you have an extra light on or keep your computer and monitor running while not in use or have your servers running at full throttle when they don't need to be, you or your company is paying for it. And it's especially useful to know when demand has spiked and your rates have suddenly shot up.

So I have a suggestion for SCE and other utility companies: Build on this idea because it seems to work. But relying on Ambient Orbs, of course, isn't practical. While they're certainly neat and cool conversation pieces to boot, they're also expensive: $150 a pop (plus shipping and handling).

But how about developing a simple desktop utility that is fed the same data stream received by these orbs? When electric rates go up, a little window can pop up telling you as much -- and perhaps provide some tips as to what actions to take. I know I'd be happy to donate a little bit of my computer-processing power to run such an application.

On a related note, I have a free utility from Uniblue called LocalCooling installed on my system, and it's designed to optimize a PC's power consumption. Among its features, it displays how many killowatt hours, trees, and gallons of gasoline you've saved by managing you computer's energy usage.

(Thanks to TreeHugger for bringing this story to my attention.)

Posted by Ted Samson on July 26, 2007 02:17 PM

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