Personal Kyoto

Thursday, May 27 2010

A couple of years ago I built a site called Personal Kyoto that scraped electric use data from Con Ed (the New York area eletric utility) and presented it on the web in a way that allowed a person to see their electric use change over time. The idea was to give people feedback on their electric use because measuring consumption is a requirement for reducing it. It turns out I was interested in building a demonstration of the the concept more than anything else, so the site effectively shut down a year or so later.

I still thinking tracking electric use (or any energy use really) is a prerequisite for any kind of sustained reduction in use and have lately been wondering what my electric use looks like at my current place. I borrowed some of the tools that I've built for Department of Numbers and got a very crude Personal Kyoto like environment up and running again. The goal here is to keep that green line (a 12 month rolling average) heading down. If I do that it means that I've used less electricity in the current month than I did in the same month the prior year. Keep doing that and the cumulative effect can be pretty substantial.