Practical UFO: Water Fountain
This is the first of a series of blogs showing practical uses of the UFO Powerstrip and how it saves electricity. As UFO Powerstrips become available and are being used for field testing, we will be able to report more practical examples. These blogs will show how counterintuitive sometimes electricity usage is.
Like most offices, we have an electric water fountain. Its power rating – like most electrical appliances – is not clear. We have used a UFO for a few weeks in our office kitchen and tried different arrangements. The water fountain is effectively a refrigerator and during this test we have not used it to pour hot water. Unlike home refrigerators, the water fountain does not have a way to adjust its temperature, leading to big wastes of energy.
When used without any restrictions, the water fountain uses per day in excess of 1.6 KWhr. That is just leaving it on all the time. We have experimented using the timer feature of the UFO Powerstrip and at first reduced it daily energy consumption to about 1 KWhr just by turning it off during the night. We then tried to be a little more clever and noticed that the water was at a cold enough temperature after turning it off for half an hour. We tried then to cycle on and off the water fountain every half hour. Interestingly, although the perception was the water was pretty cold, the refrigerator inside the fountain was still using about 70 W per hour in average, basically the same amount of energy used by keeping the water fountain on all the time.
What it really made a difference was to cycle the water fountain on and off every hour. We could still not perceive the difference but this way, we reduced the daily energy consumption to less than 0.5 KWhr.
In conclusion, we managed energy consumption of a very dumb office water fountain and reduced its daily electricity usage from 1.6 KWhr to less than 0.5 KWhr without any reducing its effectiveness.
HAN technologies at CES
At CES this year one could see different HAN technologies both wired and wireless all incompatible with each other. There are some compelling solutions and even proven ones. Among the communication protocols you could see HomePlug, WiFi, G.hn, P1901, ZigBee and ZWave.
Energy management does not need the bandwidth of broadband powerline solutions, nor their outrageous power consumption and cost (for the chips). We cannot afford 5W of standby power consumption just for the communication silicon alone (and the $10/chip they demand).
I have to express my personal dislike of proprietary solutions like ZigBee and ZWave and for their distasteful marketing operations. There are egregious standard 802.15 wireless technologies out there and using 6LoWPAN and IPv6 — the British company Jennic is probably my favorite.
I hope 2010 will be the year powerline G.hn will be available and with a much needed ’smart-energy’ profile to allow chips that can communicate with high-bandwidth nodes but that trade off bandwidth for less power and cost. In the meanwhile, we are stuck with lower performance ‘CENELEC’ standard solutions, like the one offered by ST Microelectronics.
Smart Meters and the Stimulus: We Can Do Better
Around the U.S., a number of smart meter installation projects are being paid for with tax dollars, provided by the federal stimulus package. I was very surprised –shocked even– that the projects, so far as I can tell, don’t mandate the meters to provide an option for connecting to the Internet. This, at the same time other stimulus money is going to expansion of the broadband infrastructure!
These smart meters could be using the Internet to connect to the utility back office or to devices and management systems inside customer premises. Being able to interface the smart grid to devices on the customer side of the meter could be a boon to energy management and conservation technologies.
Instead, the utilities are using smart meters for their narrow and immediate interest, seemingly without regard for what is possible today and needed long term. For consumers, the first impact of the smart meters being installed may well be time-of-day metering, which can easily translate into higher energy costs. As a taxpayer, I’m appalled that federal dollars are being used to help the electric utilities streamline their operations, while at the same time making it easier for them to charge consumers more money.
A truly “smart” grid would work to bring benefits to both power companies and their customers.
We should demand smart meters that better support real-time management and conservation for energy consumers. The utilities do not, as yet, see a benefit in doing this and politicians don’t understand the issues involved. It is up to consumers to demand an electric grid that works to their benefit, not just to the benefit of the power companies. Doing that requires customers to be educated. Sadly, there seems to be little interest in sharing useful information with customers, especially when power company interests might be threatened by doing so.
While I don’t believe the utilities have anything to fear from smart consumers, their anxiety is understandable. It must be overcome.
We need to invest in upgrading the grid to reduce reliance on foreign oil
A friend forwarded this appalling story from Homeland Security Newswire:
Questions raised about cost of, need for new electricity grid – Homeland Security News Wire
Source: homelandsecuritynewswire.com
A new national grid system for the United States would involve stringing 19,000 miles of high-voltage lines at a cost of$60 billion; some experts say this is too expensive — and unnecessary.
(Read the full story here: http://homelandsecuritynewswire.com/single.php?id=8335)
I would argue that it’s a VERY necessary investment.
Forty years after ARPANET, we all acknowledge the vision and benefits that project brought to the U.S. and to humanity at large. If we are truly serious about becoming a nation that is less dependent on foreign oil, we will need even a bolder vision for investing in the “energy highway” to upgrade our electric grid so it can support distributed energy resources on the scale needed to replace foreign oil. As we stand today, it is doubtful that the existing grid will even be able to withstand the load from the limited number of plug-in vehicles that will be sold in the U.S. in the next five years.
Response to paper about using SIP for Smart Grid Communications
Here’s my response to this paper:
I personally like SIP abut not the unnecessary complexity of a VOIP infrastructure. I find difficult to deal with all the baggage of a VOIP infrastructure.
All the arguments about SIP are valid for XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) without the VOIP baggage. There are XMPP extensions that provide PKI authentication and open source as well as commercial implementations. We have been working on using a XMPP bot on our devices and have incorporated XMPP on our server infrastructure.
We are also using something even more essential – XMPP and SIP both require an open TCP connection for each node with serious scalability problems – we should consider HTTP which is already been widely used combined with PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) authentication.
Smart Meters Lesson from Italy
Just back from a week in Italy visiting family and friends. And since I’m an energy guy, I had to check out what the country of my birth has been doing in terms of smart metering. Guess what? Their system could be an example to the United States.
Italy has a wide network of 27 million smart meters, all operational and available to more than 90% of the people. What’s really impressive is that the infrastructure was deployed in less than five years. This is even more impressive because the regulatory environment there is constantly changing and there were at least four different governments from two different political coalitions during that time. Since politics tends to be a very disruptive force in Italian life, this success is not a minor detail.
In addition to showing that a smart meter infrastructure works, I think what has been done in Italy is remarkable, considering that one independent distribution operator is providing metering services to 150 energy retailers. All of the retailers compete fiercely with each other and are able to offer creative pricing to their customers. Italian law established an independent distribution operator system (DSO), in addition to a transmission system operator (TSO). The DSO handles the metering infrastructure (with some obvious advantages from a service standpoint) and m ore importantly, simplifies all other future smart grid applications under a unified umbrella.
Here’s an application where this is especially helpful: the centralized management of public and private charging stations for electric vehicles. The prospect of having to deal with many power companies and many bills when I charge my (future) electric car in the office garage, at a theatre parking lot and at home is very real in California. It Italy, customers get a single bill for their own electric provider at its established pricing.
Italy can be at the forefront of new smart grid applications. Thanks to the very far-sighted policies of its former electric monopoly, Enel, the Italians are leading Europe in smart grid deployment and perhaps pioneering a model we should follow in the United States, too.
Is TiVo really worth 30kW/hr a month ($4.5)?
After a few months of using the UFO Powerstrip I’ve made a few interesting and unexpected findings. The first one is that the TiVo Series 3 uses in excess of 1kW/hr a day. Depending on where you live in the U.S., this translates into $3.5 to $4.5 a month for cost of electricity alone and more than 40 pounds a month of CO2 emissions! To me this is mind boggling. Particularly considering how useless the “recommendations” are and the limited use that I make of the recordings (F1, Euro Football). I can’t wait until a proper per pay streaming of international sports events becomes available so I can dispose of my power hungry TiVo.
Casadomo about Visible Energy (in Spanish)
Visible Energy is Awarded in the GREEN DOT AWARDS
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – GREEN DOT AWARDS ANNOUNCES WINNERS OF THE 2009 COMPETITION.
Visible Energy Inc. of United States was Awarded Honorable Mention in services Products for the entry titled, ” UFO Powerstrip .” The jury selected winners from thousands of entries from over 25 countries.
The Green Dot Awards™ strive to reward and promote forward-thinking businesses that create environmentally friendly products or services, and to reward revolutionary green proposals.
Recognizing that human activity is causing dramatic environmental change, we must ensure that we act today to protect tomorrow’s environment. Businesses and organizations have become especially aware of the impact that their practices have on the well-being of the planet and many are acting to adopt more sustainable attitudes. The purpose of Green Dot is to reward those who practice excellence in environmental responsibility.
Although the Green Dot Awards are worthy onto themselves, they are also a consumer guide to excellence in environmentally-sustainable practices. A business with a Green Dot Award is a business that can be trusted by consumers with stewardship of the environment. Recognition from the Green Dot Awards allows businesses to promote their products and services as items that are manufactured and delivered in an environmentally friendly manner.
