Green Right Now
By Barbara Kessler
Most commodities come with a clear price attached to a distinct amount. A bag of potatoes, a can of beans, a jar of peanut butter….the cost of these is stamped on a sign at the grocery and an individual label breaks down the nutritional details.
Zerofootprint’s TALKINGPlug™
Electricity is sold with a price tag also, a price per kilowatt. Every month, customers pay a provider based on how many kilowatts their household has used. But there’s no label breakdown.
We don’t know how much electricity was expended to power the HVAC or dishwasher or fridge or computer. It’s a mystery what caused that spike in our bill. Our worst power phantoms are hiding.
Could the problem be those old incandescent light bulbs?
We don’t know. We’re in the dark.
“The way we use electricity is quite antiquated and quite dumb,” said Zerofootprint founder and CEO Dr. Ron Dembo, in a news conference Monday to introduce his group’s solution, the TALKINGPlug™.”
If we knew more — like how much, when and on what we were spending our electricity dollars, we’d be wiser consumers, he said. We could shift electricity use to off-peak hours making utilities happier – reducing our bills and our carbon pollution.
The TALKINGPlug™ can be the starting point for all that because it takes energy monitoring to the micro level. It exposes errant appliances and runaway energy hogs in the home, but unlike similar, competitor devices that merely signal high or low energy use, it sends a stream of information to a software program (Zerofootprint’s web-based VELO™ software) so residents can monitor or re-tailor their energy use, and turn things on and off remotely via the Internet.
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