Lucid CTO, Vladi Shunturov, and U.S. CTO, Aneesh Chopra
By Michael Murray, CEO
Back in September, the U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, challenged utilities to provide energy consumption data in a portable, machine-readable format through a “Green Button.” With your building’s consumption information typically only available in a proprietary bill-pay website (or, worse, in inscrutable paper bills), the opportunities for applying software to energy data have been limited. The idea behind the Green Button is to open the opportunity to ratepayers and software companies to create innovative applications that analyze, interpret, and transform utility data into meaningful and actionable information.
The Energy Information Administration counts 3,273 traditional electric utilities in the United States. Getting all of them to agree on a data format and then implement the Green Button is an ambitious goal. That’s why I was pleased to support the effort by being invited to speak at the U.S. CTO’s meeting today in Santa Clara called “Transforming the Energy Landscape.” Convened by Chopra of the Obama Administration and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the conference brought leading companies and the CIOs of California’s investor-owned utilities into one room to talk about the “energy apps” of the future.
California’s utilities should be congratulated for voluntarily implementing the Green Button for residential customers. PEPCO in the mid-Atlantic today also announced its intent to implement the Green Button. My goal was to convince the audience of the transformative potential of the Green Button for commercial customers. Today, if businesses or institutions want an energy information system (EIS), they need to purchase and install their own meters and data-logging equipment. Not only is this expensive, but it is redundant to the utilities’ pre-existing meter reading infrastructure. Before businesses can invest in energy efficiency, they need to buy their consumption data twice – first from their utility, and second with monitoring hardware at their own expense. This diverts resources from the real activities that save energy and reduce costs. In theory, if the Green Button were ubiquitous, many EIS features could be provided solely with inexpensive software.
A standardized data model and communications protocol that lets customers grant access to third parties is called OpenADE, which Lucid strongly supports. The Green Button shares common elements with OpenADE, and we believe Green Button is an important stepping stone toward widespread utility adoption of OpenADE.
We believe that implementing the Green Button or OpenADE is among the most powerful steps a utility can take to enable conservation efforts. It is inexpensive and highly leveraged. The California utilities implemented it in a matter of weeks, and the benefits will be realized over time with every app that gets developed.
Read more:
WhiteHouse.gov – Green Button: Providing Consumers with Access to Their Energy Data
New York Times – Pushing the Green Button for Energy Savings
San Francisco Chronicle – ’Green button’ key to making sense of smart meters
Environmental Defense Fund – Getting ‘Smart’ About Your Energy Use Just Got Easier
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