EnerMeter

This radical idea comes from John Michael Greer on his blog in a piece titled: Facing the Deindustrial Age

Thus it's one thing to try to find some way to power today's industrial system with renewable sources while leaving intact the structures of everyday life that give our civilization its extravagant appetite for energy. It's quite another thing, and much closer to the realm of the possible, to use renewable energy to meet the far more modest energy requirements of an agrarian society. Especially in North America, restating the question in this way opens up immense possibilities. Very few people who live on this continent, for instance, have noticed that it's only our energy-wasting lifestyles that keep us dependent on imported oil -- with all the unwelcome economic and political consequences that brings. Even 35 years after its own Hubbert peak, the United States is still one of the largest producers of oil on Earth. If the average American used only as much energy per year as the average European, America would be exporting oil, not importing it. Only our insistence on clinging to the dysfunctional lifestyles of an age that is passing away keeps such an obviously constructive goal off the table in discussions of national energy policy.

I will repeat the money line for emphasis: If the average American used only as much energy per year as the average European, America would be exporting oil, not importing it.

Of course, cutting consumption is not the only thing we should be doing. We should be adding renewable energy sources as fast as they can be manufactured until only the most basic transportation needs are powered by oil. If we limit the use of fossil fuels to powering airplanes, we probably have enough to last quite a long time.

From the November 2009 Scientific American Magazine. Download the Full Paper from paper by Jacobson and Delucchi.

Key Concepts
Supplies of wind and solar energy on accessible land dwarf the energy consumed by people around the globe.

The authors’ plan calls for 3.8 million large wind turbines, 90,000 solar plants, and numerous geothermal, tidal and rooftop photovoltaic installations worldwide.

The cost of generating and transmitting power would be less than the projected cost per kilowatt-hour for fossil-fuel and nuclear power.

Shortages of a few specialty materials, along with lack of political will, loom as the greatest obstacles.

In December leaders from around the world will meet in Copenhagen to try to agree on cutting back greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come. The most effective step to implement that goal would be a massive shift away from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy sources. If leaders can have confidence that such a transformation is possible, they might commit to an historic agreement. We think they can.

From The Official Google Blog

Google PowerMeter's first device partner

Today, we're very excited to announce we have secured our first official device partner. (That means having a smart meter installed by your utility is no longer a prerequisite for using Google PowerMeter!) For the last several months, a few hundred Google employees have been testing a number of in-home electricity monitoring devices. Those of us lucky enough to have one of these devices installed in our homes experienced first-hand how access to high-resolution energy use information drives meaningful behavior change (PDF). So we set out to make that data easier for everyone to access and understand by sending the collected data to our Google PowerMeter software.

The TED 5000 from Energy Inc. is an energy monitor that measures electricity usage in real-time (TED stands for "The Energy Detective"). As of today, we're pleased to announce that anyone in North America can purchase and install the TED 5000 and see personal home energy data using our free software tool, Google PowerMeter, from anywhere you can access the web including through iGoogle for mobile phones. (If you already have a TED 5000, you can download a free firmware upgrade to enable this functionality.)
Combined with Google PowerMeter, the TED 5000 device can help you understand your electricity usage to save energy and money. Energy Inc. is just our first device partner and if you are working for a company that manufactures energy monitors, we'd like to hear from you. Stay tuned for more!
Posted by Tom Sly, New Business Development & Charles Spirakis, Software Engineer

And from the TED website:

Did you know that most households pay thousands of dollars a year for electricity? Thousands! The Energy Detective (TED) can easily help you save 10-20% on your electric bill - hundreds of dollars - and the more you save, the more you help your neighbors, the community, and protect our environment.
How exactly does TED help? It's really a simple concept - If you can measure it, you can manage it.

Prices range from $199 to about $500, depending on what is being measured.

Image is the XP Html Application version.

Go to widget / gadget download below.

We are involved with monitoring solar panel power generation systems in California and Galapagos. We have a web site where the monitoring results can be seen. The URL is http://rMeter.com. On the web site we show lots of details, often including the power consumption of the building on which the panels are located. People like having this information available, but a small effort is required to see the system performance on the web site.

We have also prepared widgets for Vista, Mac, and XP that show at a glance what a particular solar system is doing during the course of the day. They start the display at 6:00 AM, and continue through 8:00 PM.

The Mac and Vista widgets have a configuration feature where you can enter the URL for the specific system to be displayed into the widget. Note that these are not web page URLs and putting one into your browser will not produce anything useful (or even interesting).

 The list of presently available URLs follows:

Here is the widget for Vista

To install the Vista Widget just extract the zip file, there is a file inside called "rMeter Solar.gadget". Run it.

Vista will show the install message for the widget, click install.

To change the station you have to go to settings. (When the mouse is over the widget the icon for settings will appear.It’s the one to the right, the one that looks like a tool).

In the url box change for the url to the station you want from the list above. The widget may be installed as many times as you like, each Sidebar Gadget can have  a different url.

Here is the widget for Mac

To Open the setting page of the Mac widget, put your mouse over the widget. In your bottom right corner you will find a  small "i".  This is the common link to options in the Mac widget. Open the settings page and paste your URL in the "URL Feed" Box and Click Ok.

Widgets for XP

Widgets for XP and earlier work a little differently because XP does not have any built-in facility for running widgets. To accomplish essentially the same thing, we have created a series of "Html Applications", or .hta files, for each installation. Each of these Html Applications consists of a folder containing several files. One of these files is named "rMeterSolar.hta". Double click it.

Each of the Html Applications must be downloaded separately as follows.

Central Coating Company

West Marine Store

Live Oak Industrial Park

ElectroRoof Test

Plantronics World Headquarters

Pedro Pablo Andrade Elementary

EOLICSA Control Building

West Cliff Apartments

GSA Salinas

We have done some other widgets as well. This link will take you to a series of them we did for FeaturePics Images.

  Potsdam Institute For Climate Impact Research discussing an article in Nature, International weekly journal of science.

On the way to phasing out emissions: More than 50% reductions needed by 2050 to respect 2°C climate target

 

Illustrative Figure for free use:

   Two possible futures: One in which no climate policies are implemented (red), and one with strong action to mitigate emissions (blue). Shown are fossil CO₂ emissions (top panel) and corresponding global warming (bottom panel). The shown mitigation pathway limits fossil and land-use related CO₂ emissions to 1000 billion tonnes CO₂ over the first half of the 21st century with near-zero net emissions thereafter. Greenhouse gas emissions of this pathway in year 2050 are ~70% below 1990 levels. Without climate policies, global warming will cross 2°C by the middle of the century. Strong mitigation actions according to the blue route would limit the risk of exceeding 2°C to 25%.

...

April 30, 2009 - Less than a quarter of the proven fossil fuel reserves can be burnt and emitted between now and 2050, if global warming is to be limited to two degrees Celsius (2°C), says a new study published in the journal Nature today (1).

More...

Monterey Bay Shores Website

Off highway one north of Monterey.

Imagine how hard it would be to stick to a budget in a store with no prices. Well, that's pretty much how we buy electricity today. Your utility company sends you a bill at the end of the month with very few details. Most people don't know how much electricity their appliances use, where in the house they are wasting electricity, or how much the bill might go up during different seasons. But in a world where everyone had a detailed understanding of their home energy use, we could find all sorts of ways to save energy and lower electricity bills. In fact, studies show that access to home energy information results in savings between 5-15% on monthly electricity bills. It may not sound like much, but if half of America's households cut their energy demand by 10 percent, it would be the equivalent of taking eight million cars off the road.

And now for the new part

But deploying smart meters alone isn't enough. This needs to be coupled with a strategy to provide customers with easy access to energy information. That's why we believe that open protocols and standards should serve as the cornerstone of smart grid projects, to spur innovation, drive competition, and bring more information to consumers as the smart grid evolves. We believe that detailed data on your personal energy use belongs to you, and should be available in an open standard, non-proprietary format. You should control who gets to see your data, and you should be free to choose from a wide range of services to help you understand it and benefit from it. For more details on our policy suggestions, check out the comments we filed yesterday with the California Public Utility Commission.

In addition to policy advocacy, we're building consumer tools, too. Over the last several months, our engineers have developed a software tool called Google PowerMeter, which will show consumers their home energy information almost in real time, right on their computer. Google PowerMeter is not yet available to the public since we're testing it out with Googlers first. But we're building partnerships with utilities and independent device manufacturers to gradually roll this out in pilot programs. Once we've had a chance to kick the tires, we'll make the tool more widely available.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to providing consumers with detailed energy information. And it will take the combined efforts of federal and state governments, utilities, device manufacturers, and software engineers to empower consumers to use electricity more wisely by giving them access to energy information.

The bold is mine. There will be a place for rMeter in this environment.

I got my vote by mail ballot, and now I have to figure out how to vote. Most of the propositions an races are pretty easy, but Prop 7 is not. Most of the people I would normally listen to have come out against it. But the argument appears to be: it would be very hard, maybe impossible to meet the goals in the proposition.

I went looking for answers and found a lot of opinions:

Prop 7 opponents

Surprise opponents to renewable energy measure - Some reasons to like it

Renewals are not "practical" right now.

Implies that because a rich guy paid to get it on the ballot, it must be bad. But it has links to both supporters and opponents.

Prop 7 supporters

Looks like the "official hit piece" from the opposition

The state is already doing enough. Would not want to rock the boat.

Well, that is enough research, at least for now.

On balance, I think I will vote for it. Something needs to create some urgency in energy use. This proposition may well be flawed, but it is not "business as usual".