January 31, 2011, 2:11 pm
On the Dashboard Spy, I posted an article titled “Home Energy Dashboard“.
Since that posting, I’ve come across more coverage of in-home energy dashboards. Here’s a snippet from a Business Week article covering the topic:
Interestingly, the U.S. economic stimulus package has given a boom to these energy dashboards. There are around 6 companies working on these in-house energy consumption dashboards.
Here’s the link to the business week slideshow on these energy dashboards:
Monitoring In-home Energy Use
January 4, 2011, 8:43 pm
Dashboard Example: Real Time Energy Consumption Tracking Dashboard at University of California at San Diego.
This view of the University of California San Diego Energy Dashboard shows the total campus power consumption. This view is an aggregate of the last year’s energy use. Look how the campus shut down at Christmas!
The energy dashboard can even go down to the individual device level. View the dashboard at this link:
UC San Diego Energy Dashboard
The I.T. department at the university has saved quite a bit of electricity through the dashboard:
Using the energy dashboard, we have been able to identify the various opportunities to save energy across the UCSD campus. Our initial data, especially within the CSE building, shows that information technology (IT) equipment is one of the dominant energy comsumers in a modern mixed-use building.
Therefore, in our effort to reduce the energy footprint of IT infrastructure, several of our key research efforts focus on allowing computers (desktops and laptops) to employ low-power modes such as “sleep” more frequently. The key observation driving our research in this space is that computers are often in an idle state and are left on purely to support network-facing applications such as allowing remote access (RDP, SSH) or running download applications. Our solution to this issue is to augment computers such that they can maintain network presence and availability even in low-power “sleep” modes, thus resulting in significant energy savings
