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All Carrot, No Stick – The Peak Time Rebate
Giving people an incentive to voluntarily reduce energy usage during peak demand is what Ted Reguly of San Diego Gas and Electric discusses in this video interview. Reguly discusses the challenges of making customers aware of the program and then giving incentives appropriate to a given customer. He suggests that the role San Diego Gas…
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Home Energy Management as Content
“The furnace and the air conditioner in the average home accounts for almost 50% of energy use, so, it’s a big-ticket item about a $1,000 a year in the average home,” according to John Steinberg, EVP of Business Development and Co-Founder of EcoFactor. EcoFactor provides an energy management service with an initial focus on heating…
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Help Wanted: A National Clearinghouse for Smart Energy
A clearinghouse that brings third parties and the 2,000+ electric utilities together to create a national market for Demand Response (DR) is needed, according to Roy Perry of Alarm.com. Perry, formerly of Cable Labs, has been a thought-leader in looking at how to achieve energy efficiency goals in cost-effective ways (see this interview from the…
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The Sleepy & Instant On Set-Top
“Lite sleep” and “Deep Sleep” are two of the power-reduction initiatives that Cable Labs is actively pursuing to reduce the power consumption, explains Ralph Brown, CTO of Cable Labs. Being more efficient, without sacrificing performance and not sacrificing user-experience is their goal. With a stated aim that 90% of the set-tops purchased by the end of 2013 be…
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The Building to Building Singularity
Will we be at the singularity when the number of building-to-building conversations is greater than the number of conversations between the people in those buildings? This is the provocative question posed by Karl Rabago of Austin Energy. Rabago describes a sort of peer-to-peer smart energy management system in this wide-ranging interview at Parks Associates’ Smart…
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Smart Meters – Old School for This Electric Coop
Smart Meters are a center of controversy in California, but in the rural Missouri region served by Co-Mo Electric Cooperative, smart meters were introduced a decade ago and embraced by Co-Mo’s members. Kenneth Johnson, CEO/GM of Co-Mo, explains how their first generation smart meters helped their customers in ways that wouldn’t be obvious to someone…
