Life With TED - Micromanaging Your Carbon Footprint

I've spent three days watching my power consumption like a hawk, here's how it's going

by James Turner | comments: 3

I've been interested in having a better handle on my electrical consumption for a long time. Our family regularly goes through 1100-1200 kWh a month, and it's been frustrating that I couldn't really get a grip on where or when the power was really being used. I want to get my power usage under control for three reasons:

1. I want to reduce my $180-a-month-and-climbing power bill. Public Service Company of NH (PSNH) has one of the higher electricity rates in the country (we have a nuke we're still paying off, among other things.)


2. I'm seriously investigating adding solar to the mix, now that a 30% federal tax credit, a $6,000 state rebate, and lower prices for the panels have converged. It would be great to get my usage down into the 600-800 kWh average output I've been told I can expect a month from a system, and zero out my PSNH bill on a yearly basis.


3. I'm a firm believer in reducing carbon emissions, I'd like my 14 year old son to have a world to grow up in. I've already cut my fuel oil use in half (to a still awful 250 gallons a month in the winter, but it's a huge house...) Cutting my electricity is the next low-hanging piece of fruit on the tree.

I had been tracking Google PowerMeter, a Google initiative that lets people monitor their energy usage online, but it was only available to customers of electric providers who were using so-called "Smart Meters". Smart Meters send usage data back to the provider, and PSNH isn't one of them.

Then, this week, Google announced on their blog that normal mortals could now order a device called The Energy Detective (or TED, as he's known by his friends...) TED is made by Energy, Inc. out of South Carolina, and consists of a minimum of two components. The first piece is an inductive current measuring device that lives out in your circuit breaker box. The second is a gateway device that plugs into a wall socket and has an Ethernet jack. Optionally, you can also get a stand-alone display, so that you don't need a computer to view your usage.

Wiring the sensor device into your box is fairly straightforward. You clamp the two sensors around the mains as they come into the box. You also have to wire the device to the two "hot" phases of your 220V service (which requires two free breakers in your box on different phases), and a third wire running to neutral. If you have some basic electrical savvy, you can do it yourself, but I decided to wimp out, since my box is so crowded (after-effects of having a transfer switch put in for a generator...), so I shelled out the $85 to have an electrician put it in.

The gateway unit communicates with the sensor unit via signals sent over the house AC. As with anything using the power lines to communicate, I found the unit was very particularly to which outlet I plugged it into. It really doesn't like to share a circuit with a computer, for example. Neither of the two plugs which was actually next to a network hub would pick up a signal, but one in an adjacent room that happened to have a network jack did.

Once you have the gateway talking to the sensors and plugged into the network (it uses DHCP to get an address), you can surf to it using any browser. I can even get to it using Safari on my iPhone. The "home" screen is a dashboard, showing various statistics about current demand and your daily, weekly and monthly averages. You can view the data in terms of kWh, dollars (once you tell TED how much you pay for power, it can even handle peak period and tiered pricing models), or pounds of CO2.

All of the ranges on the dials and bar-graphs are configurable, so if you want 3kWh to be "red", you can set it up that way. You can also configure refresh rates. Clicking on the "Graphing" tab lets you view your usages second to second, minute by minute, or by daily or weekly aggregates.

It's these graphs that I have found to be most useful. You can start to see all sorts of interesting patterns, like the "heartbeat" of my furnace turning on and off at night, when the rest of the house is otherwise quiet.

I can also see the huge hump when my son wakes up in the morning, and proceeds to turn on every first floor light in the house. I was even able to tell that my wife had turned on the dishwasher before she left for school one morning.

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ETech Preview: Why LCD is the Cool New Technology All Over Again

by James Turner | comments: 7

In an early test of the OLPC XO in Nigeria, the student users dropped every laptop several times a day. Despite the laptops' rugged construction, they occasionally needed fixing, and a group of six-year-old girls opened up a "hospital" to reseat cables and do other simpler repairs. Mary Lou Jepson, One Laptop Per Child project's CTO, had this response: "I put extra screws underneath the battery cover so that if they lost one, they could have an extra one. And kids trade them almost like marbles, when they want to try to get something fixed in their laptop."

Mary Lou led the development of the OLPC's breakthrough low-power transflective display, combining a traditional backlit color display with a black and white display that could be used outdoors. She left OLPC to form Pixel Qi, and bring the revolutionary engineering used in the XO to the broader consumer market. In this interview, she discusses lessons learned from OLPC and shares her vision of "cool screens that can ship in high volume, really quickly, at price points that are equivalent to what you pay for standard liquid crystal displays."

At ETech, Mary Lou's keynote presentation delves further into Low-Cost, Low-Power Computing.

JAMES TURNER: I'm speaking today with Mary Lou Jepsen, Founder and CEO of Pixel Qi. Dr. Jepsen previously served as chief technology officer for the One Laptop per Child program where she was an instrumental player in the development of the OLPC's revolutionary hybrid screen. She also previously served as CTO of Intel's display division. Dr. Jepsen was also named by Time Magazine recently as one of the 100 most influential people in the world for 2008. She'll be speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference in March, and we're pleased she's taken the time to talk to us. Good evening.

MARY LOU JEPSEN: Hi. Nice to speak with you tonight.

JT: So in some ways, you're kind of uniquely qualified to comment on the current travails of the OLPC since you've been in highly influential positions both in the OLPC effort itself and at Intel, who some believe tried to sabotage the OLPC. Do you think that the OLPC would've had wider acceptance if the Intel Classmate wasn't competing against it?

MLJ: It is interesting. I think the OLPC, and I haven't seen the latest numbers, sold a lot more than the Classmate. I think head-to-head there's no comparison which is the better machine, and I'm not saying that just because I'm the architect. But what's really happened has been extraordinary. I think OLPC's impact in sort of spearheading the movement to Netbooks is fairly undisputed, although OLPC is not the best selling Netbook; 17 million Netbooks shipped in 2008 and that's through companies like Acer, Asus, MSI, HP, Dell. And that impact on the world is starting to be felt.

JT: What were the factors that led you to leave the OLPC program and start Pixel Qi?

MLJ: You know, I started OLPC with Nicholas in his office in the beginning, in January of 2005. And at that point, right after that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, all said it was impossible. So it became my job to sort of take that, create an architecture, invent a few things, convince the manufacturers to work with me to develop it, get a team together, and take it into high-volume mass production. And then it got to the point where my days were spent getting safety certifications for various countries.

And I just realized, it's time for me to continue doing this; this is the best job I've ever done, but to keep going, why not make these components that are inside of the XO and let everybody buy them rather than just exclusively making and designing them for the OLPC laptop. If you make more of something, you can sell it for less. So rather than just serving the bottom of the pyramid, why not take the fantastic technology that we developed at OLPC and serve the whole pyramid? Everybody wants their batteries to last a lot longer. Everybody wants screens that are e-paper-like and high resolution and sunlight readable. So why not make these for the whole world?

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ETech Preview: Living the Technomadic Life

by James Turner | comments: 3

One of the themes at this year's Emerging Technology Conference is nomadism, and there is no better example of technomads than Chris Dunphy and Cherie Ve Ard. Traveling around the country in a custom 17' trailer towed by a Diesel Jeep Liberty, they manage to run a consulting firm while satisfying their desire to see new places and meet new people. In this preview of Chris and Cherie's ETech presentation, Tales from Technomadia, we talk to them about what it takes technologically to make it work, and what a life on the road is like. Listen to the full interview, or read the transcript below.

JAMES TURNER: This is James Turner for O'Reilly Media. Today I'm talking to Chris Dunphy and Cherie Ve Ard, self-proclaimed technomadics, who travel around the country towing an ecologically tricked-out trailer. In addition to their vagabond life, they also run the consulting firm Two Steps Beyond. They'll be speaking at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference in March. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us.

CHRIS DUNPHY: Good morning, James, good to talk to you.

CHERIE VE ARD: Good morning.

JT: So why don't you start by giving a brief background for each of you and how you came to be traveling around the country together.

CD: I guess I'll start it out. I've been living technomadically for just about three years now. This has always been a dream of mine. I was with Palm and PalmSource for 5+ years, and when PalmSource decided to go off in the direction of doing embedded operating systems in Japan, I set about evicting myself from my San Francisco apartment, bought a small trailer, started traveling with it, upgraded it to solar, and then along the way I met Cherie, and, she can give her side of the story.

CV: Chris and I actually met on a Prius forum online, because he had owned a Prius and traded it in for a Jeep to pull his new home, and I had just bought my second Prius, so that's where we first encountered each other and we started the online "getting to know you" process. And finally we met up in between both of our travels and instantly hit it off. And I think it was about six months later that I had decided to join him on the road. And I've always found that my technology vision was being very mobile and with the ability to travel, so it was a trial for the first seven months. It was a very small 16-foot trailer, which we've now upgraded to a much larger 17-foot trailer.

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Shai Agassi on Electric Cars

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 11

One of my favorite sessions at the recent Web 2.0 summit was Tim's half-hour conversation with Shai Agassi, the CEO of Better Place. Better Place aims to make electric cars widespread ("the electric car as the de facto standard") by addressing major issues that have held back electric vehicles: affordability and convenience.

In a relaxed conversation with Tim, Shai described an electric car industry that resembles the mobile phone business. Just as telecom companies sell mobile handsets at a discount if one is willing to commit to a contract, their subscription-based model will allow consumers to purchase an electric car at the fraction of the normal price. Car owners will pay additional fees based on the amount of miles they drive and the type of car they choose to own. To support their subscribers, Better Place will also build extensive networks of charging spots and battery exchange stations. They will build the first "Electric Recharge Grids" in Israel and Denmark.

Prior to starting Better Place, Shai was a president at software vendor SAP. The interview briefly touches on IT and enterprise computing.

[NOTE: Web 2.0 summit videos are available on YouTube.]

Steve Souders asks: "How green is your web page?"

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 4

Steve Souders, my Velocity conference Co-Chair and author of High Performance Websites, gave me permission to repost this great analysis:

How green is your web page?

Writing faster web pages is great for your users, which in turn is great for you and your company. But it’s better for everyone else on the planet, too.

Intrigued by an article on Radar about co2stats.com, I looked at my web performance best practices from the perspective of power consumption and CO2 emissions. YSlow grades web pages according to how well they follow these best practices. What if it could convert those grades into kilowatt-hours and pounds of CO2?

Let’s look at one performance rule on one site. Wikipedia is one of the top ten sites in the world (#9 according to Alexa). I love Wikipedia. I use it almost every day. Unfortunately, it has thirteen images in the front page that don’t have a far future Expires header (Rule 3). Every time someone revisits this page the browser has to make thirteen HTTP requests to the Wikipedia server to check if these images are still usable, even though these images haven’t changed in over seven months on average. A better way to handle this would be for Wikipedia to put a version number in the image’s URL and change the version number whenever the image changes. Doing this would allow them to tell the browser to cache the image for a year or more (using a far future Expires or Cache-Control header). Not only would this make the page load faster, it would also help the environment. Let’s try to estimate how much.

• Let’s assume Wikipedia does 100 million page views/day. (I’ve seen estimates that are over 200 million/day.)
• Assume 80% of those page views are done with a primed cache (based on Yahoo!’s browser cache statistics). We’re down to 80M page views/day.
• Assume 10%, no, 5% of those are for the home page. We’re down to 4M page views/day for the home page with a primed cache. Each of those contains 13 HTTP requests to validate the images, for a total of 52M image validation requests/day.
• Assume one web server can handle 100 of these requests/second, or 8.6M requests/day. That’s six web servers running full tilt year-round to handle this traffic.
• Assume a fully loaded server uses 100W. Six servers, year-round, consume 5,000 kilowatt-hours per year or approximately 500-1000 pounds of CO2 emissions.

I think this is a conservative estimate, but there are a lot of assumptions above. And six servers doesn’t sound like a lot. 5,000 kilowatt-hours is a drop in the bucket if you look at data center power consumption. But this was just one rule on one page on one site. Think about the impact of not gzipping, not minifying JavaScript, wasteful redirects, and bloated images. If we extrapolate this across all the performance rules across all sites the numbers are much bigger.

Make your pages faster. It’s good for your users, good for you, and good for Mother Earth.

-Steve

Steve has a SXSW Bookreading on Saturday @11 AM, and will be at the O'Reilly booth on Sunday from 3:30-4:30. Stop by and say hello!