Climate of Our Future

Orb available from Ambient Devices

The August issue of Wired magazine has a very interesting article about a unique way to alert people to their energy usage, and the piece suggests an equally novel way to take advantage of the consumers’ heightened social consciousness to get them to alter their behavior.

In his story Clive Thompson Thinks: Desktop Orb Could Reform Energy Hogs, writer Clive Thompson describes how Southern California Edison’s Mark Martinez happened upon the use of Ambient Orbs to convey to customers the best times to go on and off grid. This is an adaptation of a tech originally designed to keep stock traders in the know about the performance of their holdings.

Martinez had experimented with other means of notifying the utility’s customers of peak usage times, but the glowing spheres proved much more effective:

Martinez realized he could use Orbs to signal changes in electrical rates, programming them to glow green when the grid was underused — and, thus, electricity cheaper — and red during peak hours when customers were paying more for power. He bought 120 of them, handed them out to customers, and sat back to see what would happen.

Within weeks, Orb users reduced their peak-period energy use by 40 percent. Why? Because, Martinez explains, the glowing sphere was less annoying and more persistent than a text alert.

Thompson goes on to propose a next step for the process, imagining not just individual notifications but the socializing of the data to make user’s personal habits available for public comment:

Here’s an even wilder idea: How about making our energy use visible to everyone? Imagine if your daily consumption were part of your Facebook page — and broadcast to your friends by RSS feed. That would trigger what Ambient Devices CEO David Rose calls the sentinel effect: You’d work harder to conserve so you don’t look like a jackass in front of your peers.

This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. The design firm DIY Kyoto (as in Kyoto Protocol) recently began selling a device called the Wattson, which not only shows your energy usage but can also transmit the data to a Web site, letting you compare yourself with other Wattson users worldwide. In a Borg-like way, users can see how much they’ve collectively reduced their carbon impact.

It’s a notion that trades on the Hacker ethic at the heart of the open source movement: individuals will do the right thing more times than not when their social standing and reputation are at stake. Respect among one’s peers can be a great motivator.

I’m not sure whether the same model could be applied to business entities. Maybe this kind of radical social transparency can provide the type of public accountability private corporations currently lack, but it would need to be coupled with a forceful mechanism for punishing offenders when they abuse the environment.

We’re seeing a seeming test case here in the Lake Michigan region, as media reports of BP’s carte-blanche to pollute are forcing the oil company’s actions into the bright spotlight of public scrutiny. Unless that negative PR translates into boycotts or some other economic consequence, however, it’s unlikely to dissuade the company from its recklessness.