If you can monitor your electricity use, so can the government. Guess what the next step is.
Climatewire reports:
Nine utility companies and power suppliers have committed to provide customers with their real-time electricity usage data in what the White House called a first step toward popularizing energy conservation using smartphone and Web applications.
The 15 million households served by the power companies can choose to download secured data on their inter-day electricity use by clicking an online “green button” on home computers or phones. Then customers could share the data with technology developers that are being asked to devise applications, or apps, that analyze households’ energy consumption patterns and electricity bills.
Other utilities in California, Texas and the District of Columbia, serving 12 million households, had previously signed up for the program…
Coach’s comments confirm something I am seeing more of, namely that “skeptics” are probably more responsible, more conserving of natural resources than their radical green critics.
Bars and utility companies are the only businesses that I know of that are ashamed of their best customers.
There’s a more sophisticated way to do this, it’s called reading your meter and your utility bill. But then it probably doesn’t “shame” you enough Coach.
In Illinois, they send me a monthly letter telling me my usage is 50% greater then “my neighbors” – in winter. I have gas heat and we are known as the house that looks like no one is home because the lights are off except in one room on the other side where we relax at night. Must be comparing my house to a nearby apartment complex. Waiting for the day they show up and make me replace my refrigerator or raise my rates.