ICTpost Energy Bureau
Today, people under 25 make up 43 percent of the world’s population in some countries, that number is as high as 70 percent. This amounts to nearly 4 billion young people living on the brink of the greatest technological advances and human progress while also surrounded by intractable public health epidemics, record jobless rates, outdated education systems and historic pressures on the planet’s resources.
This generation of millennials are social media savvy and eager to help create real-world change. Technology has the ability to facilitate change in the palm of their hands.
Utilities have provided lots of information and services designed to help consumers understand the difference between, say, drying clothes on a line versus in a dryer. We’ve been advised to turn off a dishwasher when it hits the dry-by-heating cycle. We have programmable thermostats in our hallways. Yet, there hasn’t been much of a change in individual behavior when it comes to energy savings.
That’s where social media can play a bigger role. Social media is custom made for bringing conservation front and center.
Using the Data
Managers of large buildings, campuses or other facilities can significantly reduce operating costs by cutting down on their energy consumption. While Smart Meters are now providing data that can allow consumers to pinpoint prime targets for energy efficiency measures, making sense of all that data is not as simple as collecting it, which could pose an obstacle to consumers’ ability to use it effectively. Using social media is NOT about pushing advertising about your energy efficiency programs but rather about finding the right balance between the different types of information you may want to share: valuable tips for customers to save money, power outages, etc.
The idea of Facebook-style status updates from a building or an energy-intensive piece of equipment might raise some eyebrows. But it also may represent a practical means of helping facilities to manage their energy consumption.
Share Tips Smartly: The way a choice is framed and presented can make a big difference. For instance, people tend to get stuck if they’re bombarded with too many conservation tips at once, such as a list on a website. Using updates on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube can give consumers the option to navigate tips the way they want to and to dig into the ones that interest them or that other people found helpful.
Smart Meters are amassing reams of data that, when effectively analyzed and applied, can help energy consumers at all levels residential, commercial and industrial cut down on both their consumption and their bills. And social media, backed by strong analytics, may prove to be an effective tool for delivering efficiency improvements.
The Command Center includes a dashboard that offers user-friendly data displays, such as graphs of energy consumption over time, which allow for remote monitoring of energy use from an office computer, tablet or smart phone. Not only can you see where energy is being spent, you can see the benefits of conservation or efficiency measures, as well as anomalies energy usage levels that fall outside of norms or expectations.
The Command Center also offers service alerts via communications feed from a controller connected to a social network. The alert specifies the potential problem area, and provides additional detail on the nature of the problem when prompted, as well as the option to request Honeywell assistance. A customer can also set energy consumption thresholds for specific assets that trigger alerts if exceeded. editor@ictpost.com
