By Rob Watson
The truth will set you free, but it’s going to cost you. The new wave of smart meters is going to bring openness and transparency to our resource consumption and we’re not going to like what we see.
We are shocked, shocked when we go to the doctor and the scale is 5 to 10 pounds heavier than the one we have at home — the one that is 10 years old, the one we weigh ourselves with on the carpet; the one where the little red line is somewhat to the left of the zero … good Old Faithful.
No longer will we have the luxury of human error to estimate our utility consumption, now we have machine error which is usually — with occasional notable exceptions — resides in the tenth’s column, not in the tens column.
It’s clear that generally we manage better what we measure better. But the devil is often in the details, as we can see from studies of consumer behavior.
For example, New York City law requires restaurants to post calories on their fast food menus. In the two years since the legislation was enacted, the results so far are mixed. The New York City Department of Health shows that on average 100 fewer calories per visit are being consumed, which means that given our propensity for Big Mac attacks, approximately 26,000 fewer calories per year for a typical fast food consumer. This translates into about 7½ pounds of weight. Not surprisingly, parents ordering for children are influenced by the information, while teenagers absolutely are not (no big surprise there, either).
Nature of the information also is very important. It is much less effective to simply show people how much they are consuming, since mostly they have no idea how they are consuming the energy or water. Many of the entries into the energy metering and analytics field, for example the Smarter Buildings software product just released by IBM or SeriousEnergy from Serious Materials, have complex analytics engines that help users benchmark whether their energy consumption is higher or lower than expected. Other tools, such as SCIwatch from Scientific Conservation, use …Read More