Home Energy Management Systems

What a great goal we have: reducing our emissions, and for some of us, saving money at the same time. Energy efficiency is growing more important and getting more attention from all sides. But wouldn’t it all be easier if it were done automatically? The concept called Home Energy (or Power) Management System (HEMS) attempts to achieve this from within our own four walls. But what is HEMS? In a nutshell a HEMS would be a central unit with a graphic interface that controls the energy usage in the different rooms of a house through its sensors.

As a whole, the system is the intricate constellation of different components that can be complex and difficult to build. The components could be energy sources (self-produced energy or bought from the grid); an array of sensors for e.g. temperature, presence of a person, etc; a central control unit along with it’s information terminals; communication unit with the grid, and other smaller secondary components.

Social Network for Energy Efficiency goes live on Earth Day 2010

New low-carbon, web-based service uses behavioral factors to nudge householders to use less electricity.

Welectricity, a free web application for tracking and reducing household electricity consumption, has been launched by startup Welectricity Inc on April 22nd 2010, the 40th anniversary of Earth Day.

Founder Herbert A (Haz) Samuel, a Caribbean energy consultant, notes that households typically consume a large proportion of total electricity in any country: “So, if we can find a way to have households consistently reduce their energy consumption, even on a small individual basis, collectively that amounts to a large saving on a country basis.”

New animation tool visualises trends in European countries over time

We just issued a press release regarding the new reegle maps statistics and animation mode … I attached it below – would be great if some of the reegle blog readers pick that up and help us to increase the outreach of our clean energy search engine 🙂

Screenshots first … then the Press Release …

=== PRESS RELEASE ===

Users of reegle, the specialist search engine for renewable energy and energy efficiency, can now select energy statistics in European countries and compare them visually using a time lapse animation on a full-screen map.  The underlying data provided by Eurostat is available for more than a decade, back to 1997.  Users can digest trends over time visually, and compare how different European countries have moved forward on clean energy over the selected period.

This new animation function is a new addition to the searchable map at the heart of www.reegle.info. With this map, users can click on a specific country and get the latest events, news, and a sampling of green energy development projects in that area. There is also a catalogue of stakeholders and an energy-oriented profile of the relevant country, and information on local green energy policies and regulations.

Launch of the China Low Carbon Platform

The China Low Carbon Platform (CLCP) has been launched this week. CLCP is a new knowledge-sharing platform for low carbon energy and low carbon development for China. The aim of CLCP is to disseminate and share information in Chinese and English on low carbon energy systems and low carbon development strategies that reduce poverty and tackle climate change in China. A specific focus of the platform is on Chinese communities. The platform provides the following services:

• Free download of resources on renewable energy, other low carbon energy and low carbon development
• Free upload of own resources by platform users
• Blogs, chat rooms and a discussion forum to share experience and resources
• Regular news on low carbon energy and low carbon development

The platform is open to practitioners, researchers, policy-makers, businesses and everyone who is interested in energy and low carbon development in China.

The platform can be found within the Eldis Community at http://community.eldis.org/china .

Members are encouraged to contribute to the platform by posting blog items, participating in discussions and uploading their own publications in English and/or Chinese.

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Renewable statistics – visualised

Yesterday a new feature called “energy statistics Europe” was launched on reegle. The aim of the underlying project was to create a tool to visualise renewable energy and relevant energy statistics on the reegle worldmap.

The first step is done, you now can overlay the map with several different statistics (source: Eurostat) including:

• Share of renewables (per type and country)
• Renewable Energy Production (per type and country)
• Electricity generated from renewable sources
• Index of GHG emissions and targets

whereas all data is available for several years.

RETScreen wins Leadership in Green Procurement Award

The RETScreen Team, developers of the free green energy deicision-making software, won the 2009 Summit Award for Leadership in Green Procurement on November 3, 2009. The award was presented in Victoria, British Columbia at the Canadian Public Procurement Council annual forum. Gregory J. Leng received the award on behalf of the RETScreen team.

The Leadership Award in Green Procurement is designed to recognise leadership and innovation in green procurement in public sector organisations, to help governments purchase goods with an environmental benefit.

The award has been launched by Summit Magazine, Canada’s magazine on public sector purchasing, in cooperation with the Environmental Choice Program and the Canadian Public Procurement Council. Summit Magazine will be running an article about the award in their November/December edition.

Over the past several years REEEP has helped fund translation of RETScreen software, which is now available in 34 languages. A new REEEP-funded project is also developing a monitoring, targeting and verification (MTV) tool for the software.

Visit the RETScreen site to download RETScreen 4.

Introduction Video to RETScreen – Source: RETScreen:
[flv:/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/retscreen_e_.flv 240 184]

What exactly is a Smart Grid?

2009 is turning into the year of the smart grid. Company press releases, government announcements and new subsidy programmes for smart grid technologies are appearing everywhere.

Many smart grid companies are focused on the transfer of information between households and utilities via wireless networks and the Internet. Essentially providing instant information on energy consumption to both the user and the provider of electricity. The idea of the smart grid is to modernize the electricity industry by overlaying digital communications onto the grid.

Smart meters in a person’s home, for example, can communicate energy usage to utilities in near real time. The utility will be able to more efficiently manage the electricity supply and potentially allow a consumer to take advantage of cheaper rates. For example, start-up company EnergyHub’s smart meter is a digital display that sits on your kitchen counter to give consumers real-time information and control over their energy usage, appliance by appliance.

Clean energy search engine (reegle) launches a map of the green energy world

It’s done  :-))  We re-launched reegle today with its brandnew design and the new clean energy map. I will keep my blog-post short and simple as there is so much to do at the moment (everyone who ever organised a launch of a product knows what I am talking about 😉 )

What’s new on REEEP’s clean energy search engine reegle:

• Brand-new design with heavily improved usability
• Widget system to customise your reegle startpage and integrate reegle widgets into other sites
• Improved search refinement possibilities (refine your search by related terms and phrases)
• The new clean energy map which forms the new heart of reegle. Users can now click on a specific location and get the latest events, news, and a sampling of green energy development projects in that area.
• New renewable energy and energy efficiency glossary
• and hundreds of other small improvements …

Try it at http://www.reegle.info – feedback is highly welcome :-))

reegle screenshot gallery:

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The Carbon Footprint of Email Spam – 17 million tons of CO2

A few days ago McAfee / ICF International released a report about “The Carbon Footprint of Email Spam“. The numbers shown in this report are amazing, the waste of electricity is frustrating and the impact of Spams on our climate (CO2 Emissions) is really frightening.

Let’s summarise the report:

• About 62 trillion spam emails where sent in 2008
• These Spam-mails used about 33 billion kilo-watt-hours, which is equivalent to 2.4 million homes in the US!
• If every inbox would be state-of-the-art spam-protected, this would reduce the spam energy consumption by 75% (which is equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars off the road!)
• The average GHG emission associated with one single spam message is 0.3 grams of CO2. Thats like driving one meter … multiplied by the annual volume of spam you could drive around the Earth 1.6 million times with emitting the same amount of CO2