Personal Kyoto

Tuesday, October 3 2006 - 0 Comments

Well, I've finally to put Personal Kyoto out there for public use. Personal Kyoto is a web application that I developed at Eyebeam in the Openlab as part of my Fellowship. PK allows New Yorkers (and hopefully more people from other cities later) to monitor their home electric use by grabbing their account data from the local utility (ConEd in this case). Additionally, Personal Kyoto analyzes each user's electric use and computes an electric use reduction goal that is based on historic electric consumption and US Kyoto Protocol targets.

The project is based on the idea that observing behavior is often the impetus for changing behavior. For instance, there's lots of anecdotal evidence that cars with MPG computers encourage drivers to drive more efficiently because they learn the driving behaviors that lead to more gas consumption and those that lead to less. Similarly, the first step for changing your financial behavior is to track your income and expenses (i.e. keep a budget). This process almost always illuminates areas where your spending can be reigned in because you see things that were invisible to you before you started recording that information. The point is that measurable, comparable feedback on behavior can change behavior.

The ideal solution for an electric consumption monitoring tool is probably to install a physical device that monitors your electric use real-time in your home or work place. However, such a device would likely be expensive (or at least cost more than $0). Personal Kyoto, however, is really the same thing — it just works with more course data supplied by your monthly electric bill and via the web instead of a physical device. It does have the benefit of being completely free though.

I've already become pretty hardcore about sniffing out vampire loads (seceretly always-on devices such as TVs, stereos, charging devices, etc) and replacing the few remaining incandecent bulbs I have at home. The results seem to be showing in my decreasing monthly average usage. If you're a New Yorker interested in reducing your energy use (and/or the money you spend on your electric bill) do check out Personal Kyoto yourself and get that average use metric heading south. If you're a software developer and are interested in working to bring PK to your city, send me an email (ben [dot] engebreth [at] gmail [dot] com).

Update/Note: I forgot to thank Mike Frumin for contributing his technical knowledge to the project as well as a few significant conceptual points. Thanks Mike.

Posted by Ben at October 3, 2006 12:00 AM

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