Another piece of making our live's more efficient is real time monitoring of our homes usage of electricity . It is another emerging field that already seems crowded with solutions, yet there are few options on the market right now.
This week in Copenhagen a call to action was issued by a number of large companies to make real time monitoring become more widespread. There is a nice piece by Martin LaMonica over on cnet about the announcement. There is also a gallery accompanying the piece which includes links to hardware and software solutions. We are anxious to get some of our clients started with real time monitoring of their electricity usage and hope that all this data will also in turn help us make our designs more efficient.
As the article mentions, until there is real time variable pricing to accompany the monitoring, there won't be a financial incentive for users to run their appliances at off peak time, thereby eliminating the need for new power plants and reducing peak demand which is the most polluting and expensive.
Real time monitoring will become essential in zero-net energy building and help the occupants manage their usage so as to achieve that balance.
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