Rebound to Utopia?

Making our homes more energy-efficient should reduce the amount of energy we use, right? That seems obvious... but it may not be as simple as it first appears.

In the late 18th Century, James Watt‘s new high-pressure steam engine delivered much more usable work from each ton of coal burned than had previously been possible—in others words it was more efficient.

In 1865, an economist named William Jevons noticed that Watt’s efficiency improvements, far from reducing the use of coal, had actually increased it dramatically. This seems counter-intuitive, but is largely due to economies of scale: as coal became a more efficient source of energy, its usefulness increased, so it was used more, so costs fell, in a loop which led to a massive increase in its use. In fact, Watt’s engines were so efficient that they were used not just to replace older coal-powered engines, but also clean sources of power such as water and wind.

This so-called rebound effect is a well-understood phenomenon in economics. If a resource becomes cheaper, its use increases. If the use increases sufficiently, it can cancel out any gains from the increase in efficiency.

Fast-forward now a hundred years or so, and three more economists, Harry Saunders, Leonard Brookes and Daniel Khazzoom, separately applied Jevons’ finding to the idea of increasing energy efficiency in order to reduce overall consumption. This culminated in 1992 with Saunders proposing what he called the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate: as the efficiency of the equipment used in industry and in the home increased, the overall consumption of energy would increase, rather than decrease, as energy became cheaper and more accessible.

This was observed in the 1970s when the oil crisis caused the automtive industry to find ways to make their vehicles more efficient. In spite of this increase in efficiency, overall consumption of oil by cars increased.

However, from the perspective of an individual household, real savings are possible. If you insulate your loft, you’ll reduce the amount of energy you use for heating. You’ll probably then spend the money you've saved on other goods and services which have an energy impact, but not as energy-intensive as burning fuel directly. So by improving efficiency in your home, you can reduce your own overall consumption and improve your quality of life at the same time. AlertMe is about making consumption more intelligent, and because households consume so much, a small amount of intelligence invested in control of this energy monster can reap large benefits.

The rebound effect is hard to predict. So what if our efforts to improve energy efficiency do backfire?

Bob Metcalfe, the creator of the Ethernet standard which connects all our computers to the internet, recently claimed that increased consumption won’t matter once energy becomes "cheap and clean".

He suggests an analogy with the early days of the internet when much attention was focused on making communication efficient, because bandwidth was so limited. But this didn’t prevent us increasing the amount of bandwidth we use: "We made bandwidth cheap and clean. And now we use a million times more." His argument is that once we’ve made our energy supplies cheap and clean, we can increase our use of it too. But is Metcalfe’s utopian vision of cheap, clean energy realistic? And how do we get there from here?

One way that governments could avoid the danger of a rebound effect is to impose a green tax, to counteract the gains from energy efficiency increases. So even though you consume less energy, you still end up paying the same, meaning that you don’t have money "left over" to spend on more energy consumption. This may well be inevitable: if there’s one thing that Governments are good at, it’s raising taxes.

Green taxes work in two ways. First, they make energy more expensive (which could be seen as just making the cost a truer reflection of the true cost to society of generating it, given the carbon production) and consumers will then react to this rise in cost by reducing their consumption, simply out of self-interest. Second, the money raised can then be ploughed into renewable energy production, taking us a little closer to Bob Metcalfe’s vision.

So where does this leave us? Should we bother to make our homes more efficient? Or will this end up increasing the amount of energy we consume? It seems clear that in the short-term, we consumers can improve our quality of life by spending less on energy, leaving us with more money to spend on other things. The rebound effect from this is likely to be small and the overall effect will almost certainly be a reduction in consumption overall. Then it’s up to governments to find ways to make sure that this reduction in consumption is used as a driver to increase the use of renewable energy sources. Perhaps Bob Metcalfe’s vision isn’t so unrealistic after all!

Sense and Sustainability

UK utility nPower recently sponsored the 2009 Energy Challenge, a student competition which sought answers to the question ‘What should a power generation company’s response be to climate change?’

First prize was won by a group of students from the MSC in Sustainable Energy Futures course under Professor Sandro Macchietto at Imperial College London The team did a fun presentation to government - and cited AlertMe as the ideal platform to use to bring their ideas to fruition.

Their idea is called Complete Energy Service Arrangements (CESA), and it sounds to me like a type of ESCO (Energy Services Company) . They describe it as follows: "Instead of selling kWhs like before, we enter into a contract with our customer. They pay a monthly flat rate. We assess properties for saving potential and make investments."

The video of the presentation is here (we're mentioned at 04:55) and the slide set is here (see notes on slide 6).

Response to DECC Smart Meter Consultation

The government recently published a paper about Smart Meters, and asked for responses. Here's ours:

An architecture which is open to consumers - and their agents

We believe that smart meters are an important part – but only a part – of our low carbon future. To realise their true benefits they must interact fully with the rest of the Smart Energy home.

The typical consumer today has almost no information about where energy is consumed within their home, and has no convenient way of optimising it. Smart Meters can be a great source of information, but they do not – on their own – cause any carbon reduction. To achieve actual reductions, the information they produce needs to be delivered to:

1) The consumer, as meaningful, engaging information
2) Home appliances, which can act on the information

Information technology, in the form of increased connectivity and intelligence, can dramatically reduce home energy consumption in two ways: 1) by delivering meaningful information to the consumer, and 2) by automatically reducing consumption by making all appliances aware of the changing cost of energy in conjunction with other important information such as lifestyle patterns and preferences.

We are moving into a future in which, for a large and growing number of UK consumers, “if information is not online, then it might as well not exist”. As evidence of this, it is the government’s stated intention to provide universal broadband within the UK by 2012, providing a permanent data connection to every home.

The UK Smart Meter roll out can take advantage of this expansion in connectivity by implementing meters and metering infrastructure with real-time, open interfaces throughout – both in the home and online. If real-time electricity and gas consumption data is made available to consumers and their agents – not just as “closed”, proprietary displays and pre-digested information, but as live accessible data – then it can be used by devices and services both inside the home and online to help the consumer drive down consumption.


In short, we believe that consumers and the environment will not derive anything close to the maximum achievable benefit from a fixed, closed architecture, where the consumer is just passively delivered “packaged” information:









Instead, we believe that the smart meter architecture should be open and future-proof, so that third-parties like Google Power Meter, AlertMe.com and many other providers can offer the consumer devices and services which leverage live metering data to deliver greater energy savings:















Answers to specific questions

1. Do you have any comments on the Government’s preference for the Central Communications model?

We agree that the Central Communications model is the right way to deliver and manage the wide area communications infrastructure and data carriage.

However, we note that under this model the Central Communications provider will collect and store detailed energy consumption data from smart meters. We believe that both consumers and suppliers should be able to analyse/visualise this data and identify the most appropriate actions to take that would reduce energy consumption.

Therefore we recommend that consumers should be recognised as co-owners, with their energy supplier, of their own live and historical energy consumption data and the associated tariff and pricing data. This data should be available to download, simply and free of charge, from a secure internet site. The data itself should be made available in an open, industry standard electronic format.

Furthermore, consumers should have the right to delegate to third parties the right to securely download, store and process their data for the purposes of data analysis and visualisation. By allowing third parties to access this data, as well as individual consumers and their suppliers, the Government will enable the market to deliver innovative new products that enable consumers to recognise energy saving opportunities and take appropriate action.

An analogy here is retail banking, where most high street banks have internet sites that allow customers to view their recent transactions and manage their accounts. However, these sites also allow their customers to download their banking data in industry standard formats, so that they can load it into third party programs which give access to a wider range of features than typical bank websites. In the energy sphere the Alertme.com energy products produce data that can be analysed on the Alertme.com website, but can also be downloaded for analysis in third party programs and on other websites. Google are working on a service known as PowerMeter, currently in private testing, that will allow users to upload and analyse data about their energy consumption. These are examples of the benefits that accrue to consumers when data about their daily activities – whether financial or energy related – is made available in open, industry standard electronic formats.

7. Do you agree with the functionality proposed for electricity meters?

Our key recommendation with regard to the proposed functionality for electricity meters is that a consumer should be able to purchase an in-home device and be confident that it can securely access real-time data from their smart meter without being restricted by the need to gain authorisation from their energy supplier.

It is important that consumers are both able to analyse/visualise their real-time energy load and consumption, and take appropriate action to reduce energy consumption, without being dependent on their energy supplier to provide this service. In-home displays are the most well known means of engaging consumers with their energy consumption. However, “home hubs” (for home area networks or HANs) will have an important role in alerting consumers to energy saving opportunities in real time, whether through in-home displays or by alerting the consumer through email, text messages, mobile phone applications and websites, and also in automatically co-ordinating (and therefore reducing) home energy consumption. The Alertme.com energy monitoring product is a good example of a third party product that can engage consumers in energy saving, using real time energy load and consumption data to power email and text message alerts, and allowing them to monitor and review the consumption using in-home displays, mobile phones and the Alertme.com website.

The Government has an opportunity to create a dynamic market for products and services that let consumers analyse their consumption data and suggest energy saving options. In practice, this means that in-home devices such as displays and “home hubs” should be able to securely access real-time data from electricity and gas meters using an open industry standard such as the ZigBee Smart Energy profile. Such data would include real-time electricity load, recent electricity and gas consumption, tariff and pricing information, and other information originating from suppliers such as demand-response requests and meter-functionality updates.

Consumers who purchase an in-home device to measure and manage their energy consumption, such as a display or an Internet-connected home hub, will expect their new device to easily interface with the smart meter. However, consumers should also be confident that their energy consumption data will not be available to unauthorised third parties. Therefore it is important to create a security scheme for access to real time smart meter data that balances the requirement for data security with an open market for innovative in-home devices.

Giving suppliers the right to arbitrarily block in-home devices from accessing real-time data generated by their customers’ smart meters would allow them to impose unreasonable barriers to market entry for innovative in-home devices. Although suppliers have an important role to play in the deployment of in-home devices, we strongly believe that consumers should be able to purchase and self install an in-home device that can access real time energy consumption data without having to obtain permission from their supplier.

There may therefore be a need for a security accreditation process for in-home devices to be allowed to securely access this real-time data. This process should be run by the Central Communications provider, who should mandate an open, industry standard security scheme to be supported by smart meters and in-home devices, such the ZigBee Smart Energy profile. If it becomes necessary to create a central, Internet-connected authorisation service for consumers to “pair” in-home devices with their smart meter then the Central Communications provider should be responsible for operating this service.

9. Do you agree with the functionality proposed for gas meters? Please explain your reasons and if possible give reasons for your comments.

We believe that the same principles of allowing in-home devices open access to real-time data should apply to gas meters and electricity meters. It is clearly also important that the same wireless protocols and security scheme that governs the interaction between in-home devices and electricity smart meters should be implemented on gas smart meters. This will reduce the cost of in-home devices, by allowing the same chipset and software stack to be used for access to both meters in a typical house, and enable consumers to engage with an integrated, whole-house view of their energy consumption.

12. Do you agree with the Government’s position that a standalone display should be provided with a smart meter?

We fully support the Governments intention that consumers who have a smart meter installed are able to better understand their energy consumption and take steps to reduce their energy consumption, save money and save carbon. We agree that one way to engage consumers is to bundle a real-time in-home display with each newly installed smart meter. However, we are concerned that by choosing to mandate a real-time display, at the suppliers’ expense, the Government may actually be preventing suppliers from installing other types of in-home device, such as smart-meter enabled “home hubs”, that would enable more sophisticated and long-term energy saving strategies. This is underlined by the eight year roll out timetable – in that time, entire new categories of energy saving products and services are likely to emerge, but their adoption in the UK could be significantly impaired if suppliers are required to install simple, in-home displays with an obsolete, out of date specification.

We believe that Government should require suppliers to drive consumer engagement by offering in-home devices to consumers when a smart meter is installed, but that the suppliers should be allowed to offer a range of options to consumers that have been proven to enable energy savings. These options might include simple and advanced real-time displays, but also “home hubs” that monitor energy consumption and engage consumers through website, mobile phones or indeed in-home displays, and other technologies that are not yet widely available. Government may choose to require suppliers to submit such devices or products for certification, whether through CERT or a similar process. Crucially, this would allow innovative new energy saving products to be introduced to the market by suppliers, giving consumers the benefit of new technology as it emerges, and avoiding inappropriate technology lock-in.

The Alertme.com energy monitoring product is a good example of a third party product that can engage consumers in energy saving, using real time energy load and consumption data to power email and text message alerts, and allowing them to monitor and review the consumption using any combination of in-home displays, mobile phones and the Alertme.com website.

13. Do you have any comments on what sort of data should be provided to consumers as a minimum to help them best act to save energy (e.g. information on energy use, money, CO2)?

As we have outlined in our answers to questions 1 and 7, we firmly believe that consumers should be recognised as co-owners, with their energy supplier, of their own historical energy consumption data and the associated tariff and pricing data. This data should be available for consumers to easily download in electronic format from a secure internet site. Furthermore, consumers should have the right to delegate to third parties the right to securely download, store and process their data for the purposes of data analysis and visualisation. The same principle should apply to real-time energy data generated by smart meters.

We believe that the Government should specify the items of data that smart meters should capture and make available, both in real-time locally, and to the Communication Provider. However, we do not believe that the Government should mandate the specific data that consumers should receive. As we have explained in our answer to question 12, we believe that suppliers should be required to drive consumer engagement by offering in-home devices to consumers when a smart meter is installed, but that the suppliers should be allowed to offer a range of options to consumers that have been proven to enable energy savings. These options might include simple and advanced real-time displays, but also “home hubs” that monitor energy consumption and engage consumers through website, mobile phones or indeed in-home displays, and other technologies that are not yet widely available. Specifying the “correct” set of data that is presented to consumers would limit the scope of innovative devices and products that might lead to new methods of enabling energy saving by consumers.

We did mean to go to sea

Recently at bedtime I've been reading my son Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series, in particular the excellent "We didn't mean to go to sea". The four children go on a sailing trip in the care of Jim, an experienced sailor aged 17. Jim moors them in the mouth of the River Orwell, rows off to get some petrol for the engine ... and doesn't come back. Fog descends, the anchor starts to drag, and before they know it the children are fighting to get the yacht under control as they drift past "Beach End Buoy" into the North Sea with a storm rising. Exciting stuff!

I was lucky enough to spend last weekend sailing in the North Sea, and around the Rivers Orwell and Stour, which is the setting of the book. We saw the buoy and we even saw Arthur Ransome's yacht "Nancy Blackett", which inspired the story, sailing past us - it's now owned by a trust.

The mouth of the river is bracketed by the busy container port of Felixstowe and the old port of Harwich, and on Felixstowe docks I was intrigued to see a pile of wind farm pillars and turbine blades stacked ready for installation. We then sailed south down the coast close to the Gunfleet Sands Offshore Wind Farm, where 48 turbines are being installed.

The process is fascinating to watch. A massive floating platform called the Titan 2 is used to ferry the parts out to sea and then fix them to the sea bed. Self-powered, it can manoeuvre in any direction, and when it reaches the destination it lowers its legs onto the sea floor, raising it up into a stable platform, from which its cranes can lower the parts and assemble them. I was told that a sister ship capsized and sunk in high seas a few years ago - it must be extremely unstable with the legs all lifted - although I admit I haven't been able to verify this story!

These turbines are HUGE - and when the entire farm of 48 turbines is fully operational (summer of 2010), they will deliver enough power for 120,000 homes. It's at once very exciting to see some real action on delivering renewables, and yet also puts it into perspective that this will provide less than 0.5% of our domestic requirements. Still, it's a start, and it shows leadership. More please!

How much can AlertMe save you?

When I joined AlertMe a few months ago, it didn't take long for me to realise that the company's plans with regard to energy were truly impressive. One thing I couldn't help wondering, though, was how much money could a system like this really save me? Of course many people are motivated by the environment or energy security, but for most people it's pleasing to see a real cash saving from energy monitoring and management.

Recently, I found the answer to this question, and it came as a big surprise.

I've been monitoring my house's electricity consumption using technology that AlertMe will be launching later this year. I was able to see most of the big loads such as washing machine, tumble drier and fridge, but there were two mysterious loads: one that came on every hour like clockwork and used 2kW for about a minute, and another that came on less frequently (a few times a day) but used a lot more energy. By a process of elimination and experimentation I eventually found the culprits: an immersion heater (which we really don't need since the gas heated water is more than enough for our needs) and a small electric water heater in the out-building in our garden.

So, on 26th May, I turned off the first of these, and on the 27th, I turned off the second. The effect has been dramatic. The average electricity consumption of our house before the 26th was around 28kWh, or over £4 per day. After the 27th, average consumption has dropped to around 17kWh, or just £2.50 per day. This equates to a saving of about 40% or an annual saving of over £500! All from just turning off two water heaters that we don't need.

This may well be a fairly unusual case, but it makes the point that most people have no idea how much energy they're using or where the energy is going. As you can see from the picture, the immersion heater is huge, and hard to miss, but frankly I'd never really considered what it was or what it did, and it certainly didn't occur to me that it was costing me hundreds of pounds a year to run!

Do you know how much it costs you to run your washing machine or dishwasher? Or your lighting? And how do you make a decision about whether it's more important to stop leaving your TV on standby or to just buy a new one?

AlertMe's Smart Energy and Monitoring solution provides you with information which you can use to make real savings, and the wealth of new features we have planned for the coming months will make it even easier to understand and control your energy consumption.

Funded!

What a wonderful word. It is great to able to spread the excellent news that AlertMe has succeeded in raising a big chunk of cash - £8m ($13m) - from the world’s top clean-tech investors, which sets us up for our next strong phase of commercial growth.

With all the recent crises of war, food, oil and finance it’s clear the next few years are going to be quite challenging for the world. And since investment tends to be a lead indicator for bad news, the last 9 months have been a tough time to be raising money. OK, that’s English understatement - if you remember, just a few months ago the headlines were full of talk about the possible collapse of the Western banking system, with banks defaulting almost daily. So it’s been tougher than tough.

But humans, for all our faults, have one redeeming quality which shines out in tough times – we rise to a challenge. And the biggest challenge facing all of us on this planet right now is that we’re living beyond our means when it comes to energy consumption – whether its concern about Putin turning-off the pipelines, or declining oil reserves, or climate change, we can’t continue with business as usual.

However, the great thing about challenging times is that they create opportunities for inventive solutions. It’s interesting that way back in 1916 Thomas Edison could forsee change:

“You see, we should make use of the forces of nature and should obtain all our power in this way. Sunshine is a form of energy. Wind and sea currents are manifestations of this energy. Do we make use of them? Oh no! We burn forests and coal, like tenants burning down our front door for heating. We live like wild settlers and not as though these resources belong to us. “

When our grandchildren look back in 100 years time, I believe they’ll mark sometime about now as the time that we finally faced-up to the big responsibility of being the dominant species on Earth. We’ve got someone in the White House who is showing leadership - and hopefully we’ll soon be able to say the same in the UK. The tides are changing, the winds of change are blowing … and although we can generate electricity from both, we’re going to need to get the consumption side of the equation under control to have a hope of true sustainability. So when our grandchildren ask what we personally did about it … well, I think that AlertMe Smart Energy can make a big difference.

We’re not the only player in town – many companies are looking at this space. Some are focussed on the “Smart Grid”, working to provide utilities with ways to get energy from the power stations to the meter outside the home. And some are, like us, saying “hey, don’t forget the consumer!” The fact that our platform has already had more than a year and a half of real-world testing by paying customers, and that we’ve shipped more than 15,000 ZigBee units, gives us something of a lead, but we’re going to have to keep moving really fast to keep ahead of our followers.

The huge raft of new features we’ve added for AlertMe 2.0 takes us a long way towards our goals – and the early feedback is that they are features that the world clearly wants. In our customer satisfaction surveys, and in our daily interactions with customers, the clear message is that consumers are adopting AlertMe as an integral part of their daily lives.

As I said, it’s been a “tough” time to be going out raising money. We went out to the market in July last year, and as we took our road show around the European and US venture capital market, the financial situation got worse and worse. Then Lehmann Brothers collapsed, and no-one wanted to do anything anymore, particularly anything involving consumers.

Well, almost.

Luckily inside the storm cloud of climate change there was a silver lining for us. There are some truly humungous Cleantech venture funds out there, keen to seize the massive opportunity that this energy revolution represents.

In August we started talking to the biggest of them all – Good Energies, a global fund who invest many hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Until now they’ve mainly invested in big supply-side renewable investments like Solar and Wind, but they were one of the first funds to realize that managing the demand side (i.e. consumption) is just as big an opportunity. They are fans of the statement that “the cheapest kilowatt-hour is the one you don’t have to generate in the first place”. So they geared-up their significant team and network to the task of doing “due diligence” on this whole new consumer-oriented energy-saving space – and understanding our role in it.

We took our road-show to Silicon Valley. I lived there for 6 years in the 1990’s, and I appreciate the straight-talking can-do attitude of Northern California. For several years I’ve been boring my English friends with the prediction that one day, when the Americans finally get around to paying attention to climate-change, then almost overnight they’ll step-up and take a leading role in solving it. I think we’re witnessing this change right now, and it’s great to see. The leading clean-tech investor in the Valley is VantagePoint, and the more time they spent looking at us, the more they liked us. Their decision to invest gives us a vital connection to this key part of the world. I was lucky-enough to spend some time recently at their annual “ResourcePoint” conference where we learned about the effects of the Obama stimulus package from leading lights in the US energy ecosystem.

Meanwhile, back in our home continent of Europe the leading consumer venture capital company is Index. They have nurtured massive consumer startup hits like Skype and LoveFilm and we wanted some of that magic, so we were delighted when they said they’d invest too. They are almost unique in understanding just how important it is (and how much focus it takes) to really engage effectively with consumers.

And finally – but perhaps I should have mentioned them first of all – we also have a Dutch Cleantech VC called SetVP on board. They were in fact the first investors to track us down last summer, and since then they have been unswervingly supportive. Like us, they understand that speed and agility are vital, and it’s no overstatement to say that without them this just wouldn’t have happened.

Originally we were looking to close this funding round in October. You’ll notice that it’s taken a bit longer than that, for understandable reasons. To keep us going at maximum speed through this period has taken strong support from our Angels and investors - and of course most importantly our customers, whose increasing numbers have helped drive our revenue upward even through these tough times.

Throughout it all, I had great faith that we’d succeed, even in a competitive space, even at a challenging time, because quality generally wins-out in the end. And speaking of quality, a phrase we have heard from every single investor we talked to is “you have a very high quality team”. And we do! Not just in terms of the specialist skills in the team, but also in the way everyone gets on, trusts each other to do their job, greets adversity with humour, and looks-out for each other. So huge thanks to everyone at Team AlertMe. Funding is always a bit of rollercoaster ride at startups, and the last few months have felt at times like the kind of rollercoaster you see in an Indiana Jones movie. But through all of this, our wonderful team has continued to focus single-mindedly on continuing to build AlertMe into a world-class player – delivering the major new AlertMe 2.0 service upgrade, closing deals, keeping our customers happy and generally getting us to the point where we can now rightly claim to be THE world’s leading Smart Home Energy company.

It seems that we’re very lucky to find ourselves at the centre of such an exciting and important space at just the right time. There’s a huge wave to ride and we find ourselves out in front of it, paddling hard. But as Thomas Jefferson said: “I'm a great believer in luck. And I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”

Earth Hour - a day early

So there I was on the evening of March 27th, putting the children to bed, and vaguely thinking that the WWF's "Earth Hour" was due to happen tomorrow (where everyone turns off their lights for an hour to show awareness of climate change) when suddenly...

The lights went out! In fact, everything went out. Had I got the date wrong? Was this some kind of government-enforced black-out to make sure we got the point?

We got the flashlights and candles out, and looked outside into a dark street - it was a village-wide outage at least. Quite fun really, once we'd reassured the children that it was only temporary, to be reading books by candlelight.

And then to bed. The children like to have a little nightlight on, but of course the nightlights weren't working, and I wasn't too keen on the idea of candles in their bedrooms. Then I realised that since our AlertMe system was still working unaffected I could just set our AlertMe lamps to "White" and give them one each for the night to keep the spooks away. They were a little bit too bright (I've asked the guys at AlertMe to add a new "dim white" option) but they worked like a charm.

During the night I was vaguely aware of the power coming back on then going off again a few times - and indeed when I checked the log from work the next day, I saw that after the first major outage the power failed another 6 times that night for short periods.

Certainly makes you appreciate how reliable the grid normally is.

Google PowerMeter - data wants to be free

The folks at Google.org have gone public with a prototype project they've had in skunkworks for a while called the Google PowerMeter. The idea is to help people understand their energy usage better by providing visualisation and analysis tools, in much the same way that Google already does for advertisers with its Adwords/Analytics tools.

Of course to visualise your energy consumption you first have to measure it. As they quote William Thompson, Lord Kelvin: "If you can not measure it, you can not improve it."And Google have spotted that although many of the Smart Meters currently being rolled-out in the USA do measure it, they don't then give consumers access to their own data. So Google are campaigning to change this, saying: "We believe that detailed data on your personal energy use belongs to you, and should be available in a standard, non-proprietary format."

We couldn't have said it better ourselves - AlertMe passionately believes that data wants to be free, and from the start our customers have been able to export their data manually, into a spreadsheet. Now we're exploring ways to integrate seamlessly with new online tools like PowerMeter so that our customers can ever-more easily engage with their energy usage.

(on an almost entirely unrelated note, but on the general theme of doing a great job of visualising data, if you haven't already seen it do check-out Hans Rosling's 2006 talk at TED - he does a fantastic job of making dry statistics leap out and dance - a real delight.)

Joys of 2.0

I've been using AlertMe 2.0 in my home for a few weeks now. I'm always keen to be a guinea-pig for our new features and accessories, partly just to help out with beta testing (real-world testing beats lab testing, any day) but also as a sanity-check that what we're about to bring to market really does do a useful job in a useful way.

Our engineers will tell you that it normally takes me all of 5 seconds from seeing the first demo of a new feature to coming up with 10 things that need improving about it (but I do try to wait that 5 seconds - or 10 if I'm really blown away). So I try to be our harshest critic. But I have to say that 2.0 is really working for me.

Just before Christmas I grabbed two SmartPlugs from the very limited pre-production run to play with at home. One has ended-up on our media centre, where it is reducing its standby consumption, and the other is being used to measure power consumption of our kettle, for no good reason than I wondered if kettle consumption was significant.

AlertMe 2.0 is a major upgrade of the AlertMe service. It supports not just the features required for our new Energy accessories, but a whole load of new functionality that is generally useful. The charting has been significantly improved - you can now look at data on a timeline instead of a chart. For example, from the chart left you can see when we boil the kettle (a national UK pasttime!), top, and when we watch TV, bottom, over the course of a week or so.

You can also see totals for how much energy you've consumed over a period of time:









From the individual SmartPlug icons, you can also see consumption at a glance, and even turn the appliances on and off by clicking on the 0/1 button.

We now also have whole-household electricity monitoring working too, so as well as this appliance-by-appliance SmartPlug view, you can look at, and log, your overall household consumption. As with temperature charts, it can get surprisingly addictive!

And now for the real joy of 2.0. We've had very cold weather in the UK over the past couple of weeks - temperatures have stayed well below freezing throughout the day. The trouble with this is that by around 2 o'clock in the morning, my 3-year-old's bedroom has been getting pretty cold, and she'd wake up and come and wake us up too, to cuddle in. After the third such night, I decided it was time for action! We have a small portable oil-filled electric radiator, with a thermostat which does a great job of regulating its own temperature, but an awful job of regulating the overall room temperature, because of course the thermostat is right next to the source of heat (I've seen the same problem with the Thermostatic Radiator Valves on all our radiators, but that's another story).

I though "Aha!". AlertMe does a fantastic job of measuring room temperature, so now I should be able to use a SmartPlug to control the heater, et voila. And indeed using one of the new "do more" buttons which reveal a lot of the power in the 2.0 release, with literally 5 minutes of effort, total, it worked first time. A few clicks on the website (about 15, to be honest, and we need to work on getting this down) and moving the Smart Plug from my Media Centre to the radiatior, and it was all set up to turn the radiator on if my daughter's room fell below 14C (and off again if it exceeded 16C). The "Do more" button drills down to an action chooser, so you can use any cause (e.g. temperature) to cause any action (e.g. turning a Smart plug on and off). The idea is that people who want to do advanced things can do them, but the interface stays clean and simple for everyone else.

And that night ... peace!

Now that really is worth something.

Alertme gets fibre to the door

Back in the summer we had fibre-optic cable run to our offices in central Cambridge. Optical fibre can carry more data than any other kind of connection, so this is great for us as a web services company. In the UK our services are actually hosted at a decomissioned nuclear bunker in Kent, which has several fibre connections backing each other up, but having our own fibre connection lets us manage them better.

In Britain many ADSL broadband users will soon be getting their own fibre connections, as BT starts upgrading from copper wire. Fibre-to-the-door is already standard in parts of the US and South Korea, and can be expected to elevate the connected home to a whole new level.

Sorting through the year's photos I found some of Alertme's fibre being installed. In the top two it is being blown down the hill to us and in the bottom two it is being carefully run under the pavement to our front door.

20/20/20 by 2020

Earlier this month the 10,000-strong United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznań, Poland didn't appear to achieve much, managing to remove a colon. However, it certainly advanced the intensely political process of agreeing what to do about climate change, and the EU affirmed previously set climate goals in the teeth of bad economic weather.

Those goals form the famous 20/20/20 by 2020 policy, first proposed by the European Commission in January 2007, approved by European Councils of first Environment, then Prime Ministers in February and March 2007, drawn up into a legislative package by the European Commission in January 2008, and now voted into effect by the European Parliament on December 17th, directly after the Poznań conference. Apart from providing an insight into the EU at work, what this means is that Europe has now legislated measures intended to let us meet three goals by the year 2020:

• cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20% over 1990 levels; 30% if other countries act similarly
  
• supply 20% of total energy (heat and transport as well as electricity) from renewables such as wind and sunshine
  
• make efficiency savings of 20% over forecast consumption

Doing this in only eleven years will be no mean feat. The scale of investment needed in new, clean electricity generation is unprecedented. In 2005, the latest year for which Energy.eu has statistics, Europe supplied only 8.5% of its total energy needs from renewables, and of that a full 89% was supplied by biomass and hydropower. Biomass may be able to grow, but it tends to come with other environmental costs; hydropower has rather limited potential for further growth. Whichever renewable technology we use, building this much of it by 2020 means we have to start now, which means we can't wait and see what clever new technologies can do for us. It's a safe bet that we'll be seeing a lot more wind turbines and solar installations.

But energy production is only one arrow in the EU's quiver. The other is cheaper, easier, faster and more likely to hit it's '20% by 2020' target: efficiency. Efficiency gets a lot less press than glamorous energy production technologies, but it is something everyone can have a hand in, not just industry and government: 26% of the EU's total energy consumption is consumed at home. What's more, saving energy saves money as well as the environment - the cheapest kilowatt is the one you never use.

There are hundreds of ways to use less energy at home, by using it more efficiently, or by just not using it in the first place! According to the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology, most households in the UK could cut their energy consumption by a third just by using it more efficiently. Alertme's energy management service will soon be able to help by showing you how you use energy - including whether you were at home at the time - and by suggesting how you could save it. By optimising your heating programme, which in the UK (and across the EU) accounts for about 70% of household energy consumption, we'll be able to save you even more energy without you having to lift a finger.

We'll talk about energy saving in more detail in future posts. For now, we should note that Poznań is an important half-way mark in a two-year negotiating process to reach a post-Kyoto climate change deal; the world's best hope for coordinating a response to climate change. The next UN Climate Change Conference is in Copenhagen in December 2009. It is expected to be make-or-break time for an effective successor to the Kyoto Treaty, and if incoming US President Barack Obama follows up on his promises, this time it it may well be led by the US.

Happiness is...

...having great customers who love us!

We've completed the first ever AlertMe customer survey. Twenty-nine percent of our customers made the effort to take part, giving us heaps of feedback on what we're doing right and how to make AlertMe even better.

We wanted to learn so rather than forcing tick-box answers, we asked mainly for free-form written responses, to hear from the heart as well as the head. We then trawled through the written answers, categorizing them into sensible categories. Here are the results, illuminated with a sprinkling of representative comments.

Overall
First we asked whether AlertMe is good value. A whopping 94% said "Yes!"
We then asked about overall satisfaction with AlertMe, and were delighted to hear that more than 30% of our customers think we are wonderful (OK, we did pre-pick the 5 categories for this one):


We asked "why?" - and here are some of the answers:

• “Originally spouse was cynical of system and thought it was toys for the boys, but has been pleasantly surprised with the support and service provision”
• “The ease of use, my girlfriend is a complete technophobe. All you have to press is one button or the other. I have yet to explain the online side of thing”
• “A useful boy's toy according to my girlfriend….”
• “Excellent, but sometimes has problems (e.g. sensors dropping off, keyfobs not always working). Reliability seems to increase with each firmware update”
• “The booster lamp doesn't need to be a lamp...I'm not a student, I don't need a colour changing flashing lamp going 24hrs a day....”
• “One battery fits all – brilliant”
• “I think AlertMe type services are a very smart way of defending property, and are the way of the future”

Likes and Dislikes
We asked what you liked most, and least...

The six aspects of AlertMe that were liked most were (best first): Simplicity, Web interface, SMS/Email/Voice notification, Expandability, Customer Service and Style. It is really great to see that simplicity is valued so highly by our customers, because it takes a lot extra work "under the hood" to make a technical product simple - which is probably why so many technology companies just don't bother.

But before we get too big-headed, you were equally frank about the areas where you think we still have some way to go. The six aspects of AlertMe that were liked least were (worst first): Hub too quiet, keyfob too big, false alarms, bell box, hub light/volume control, no cameras. There were also several comments about gremlins and teething troubles. The good news is that we're already working to address all of these - except for bell-boxes which we hate almost as much as your neighbours do! If you'd like more window-stickers to use as a deterrent, please ask.

Would you recommend AlertMe?
We asked whether you'd recommend AlertMe to others. 63% of our customers have already recommended us, and to an average of 5 other people. In marketing-speak, this is "viral growth". Sounds horrible doesn't it, but it's a Good Thing!




Unexpected Features
It's fascinating to hear what surprises people had when they first installed and used AlertMe:

• Temperature-measurement
• Night mode
• How big the keyfobs are …. and how small the hub is
• Presence
• Energy coming
• Packaging ("wow" Apple-like experience)
• The upgradability of it
• That you can add so many accessories
• GPRS and battery backup
• Being able to control it via SMS
• The phone-in feature
• Didn't realise hub would play a message when alarm was triggered
• Barking dog doorbell
• Uploadable audio for doorbell sounds

(and my favourite...)

• How fun it is!

Conclusion
We are driven by a passion to create a company which gives its customers a truly excellent experience. Our great team has put in a lot of hard work to try to achieve that, and it makes me very happy to see that, by and large, we are achieving it. Thank you so much for all your support, and sometimes your patience when things don't quite go according to plan.

Please keep the comments coming - we always love to hear from you - in the forums, by email, IM or phone.

The Bubbles of Radio

I wanted to share this wonderful image which my colleague Amyas found - a beautiful visualisation of different radio technologies. Click on the picture to find out more...

Can we avoid a "lights out" scenario?

I went to a fascinating Cambridge Energy Forum meeting last week – around 100 people in the Cambridge Union debating chambers. Great mix of entrepreneurs, academics and energy businesspeople present, and the debate was chaired by Prof Ian Fells. The purpose of the evening was to kick-off of a 6-month project to thrash out an energy policy to present to the government. This will be tracked online with a wiki.

There were 3 short talks followed by debate:

1) Prof Fells has just co-authored a paper called “A Pragmatic Energy Policy for the UK”, with Candida Whitmill, who used to work for the DTI on energy. The thrust of the paper is that the lights will go out in the UK in 2014 (specifically, electricity supply will no-longer be able to meet demand), such is the huge hole we have got into due to the lack of new power station build over the past 10 years. It’s too late now even to build new power stations. Therefore forget climate change, energy security is a much more pressing problem.

2) The Financial Times' environmental correspondent Fiona Harvey then countered, saying that some of the assumptions were pessimistic, and that it is still possible to address energy security and climate change together.

3) Then Prof David Mackay, a well-known Cambridge mathematician (and founder of startups including MetaFAQ), presented his plan for getting the UK to carbon neutrality by 2050, avoiding an energy crisis along the way. This was really fun, gazillions of numbers, and he’s written a book which is free online called “Sustainable Energy, without the Hot Air”. From memory:

a. Total energy requirements of the UK now 250GW

b. Convert all transport to electric

c. Knock down majority of old houses, since they are impossible to make energy efficient

d. Convert all home heating to airsource heatpumps (driven by electricity)

e. Build lots of nuclear, and lots of diverse electricity generation sources, from tidal and wind, and massive PV plants covering most of Libya and Algeria, delivering electricity into Europe (you lose 10% per 1000km in high voltage distribution).

f. Avoid all microgeneration. Wind turbines are ineffectual, CHP is much less carbon-efficient than heat-pumps, and even if we covered every rooftop in the UK, PV could only supply 5% (?) of our needs

g. To sustain a home’s energy need using wood burning, each home would need an area 20 times the size of the home’s footprint.

h. Prof MacKay lives in a Victorian home, and he has already reduced his energy consumption by more than 50%, by becoming very aware of where energy is going.

i. 4m people in UK are in fuel poverty today, defined as spending more than 10% of household income on energy. Will be 6m by 2010.

Everything I heard reinforces the view that we need to tackle the energy crisis in many ways simultaneously, and in particular that better management of domestic energy consumption can make a real difference, quickly.

Solar Air Heating in the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

We’ve considered installing a solar-thermal hot water heating system at home - the rear roof of our house faces south-west which would be ideal. But we’ve been put-off by the capital cost and disruption, and also by the realisation that hot-water-heating is only a relatively small part of our total energy bill – which is dominated, in winter at least, by space-heating.

Because we have small children, our house is usually occupied even during the daytime, so in the Winter we have to set our “programmer” (timer) so that our central-heating is “on” for most of the day. In Summer we can of course turn our central-heating off completely. But Spring and Autumn are interesting seasons, because the outside air temperature varies unpredictably from balmy to freezing (so sometimes the heating is needed and sometimes not), and yet it is often sunny.

On the rear of our house we have a conservatory, which gets very warm when the sun shines. My wife realised that throwing-open the doors between the house and the conservatory on warm days provides a very effective way to air-heat the house – with no capital outlay. 

AlertMe makes this effect very visible, and shows us how to optimise it. The chart below shows a week earlier this month. All the inside rooms are averaged-together, and on 4 of the 7 days there is a significant proportion of the day when the conservatory is considerably hotter than the house. 

 

If we zoom-in and display the "typical day" from this data, we see that for about 6 hours of the day our conservatory can on average provide useful heating of our home, and we should open the doors at 11am and close them at 5pm.