Digital Tools Help Users Save Energy, Study Finds

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the Energy Department conducted a yearlong government study. In the Olympic Peninsula, they installed digital tools to control families’ utilities using the internet. This allowed them to adjust the trade-off between having heat and how much they would pay for it. This experiment was really just as much an economic one as a science experiment.

With the economy being so bad, it is likely that people would want to spend less on things such as utilities. This program allowed them to regulate how much money the families were willing to spend. Then, they could amend their plan based on individual circumstances. For example, Jerry and Pat Brous had their thermostat to remain off ten degrees above or below the temperature that they picked, but in the winter, it was too cold. Therefore, they changed the range to five degrees above or below. Overall, they would still be saving money, but they still had control over the heating in their home.

This article mainly expresses how people like to be on control of their surroundings. The families’ ability to control the temperature of their house and the price to heat it made this an enjoyable experience for them as well. As I previously mentioned, many people do not desire to spend a great deal of money on utilities, so this program helped them to have power over just how much they would be spending over a year. And since the families were able to track how much money they were spending, they were more wary with using electricity. Taken as a whole, this caused each of the families involved in the experiment to reduce the amount of electricity they used.

Moreover, this decrease in electricity use is helping to save the environment. The Pacific Northwest Laboratory of the Energy Department predicts that over a twenty-year person, this program could save seventy billion dollars that would have been spent on power plants and let us avoid building thirty large coal-fired plants. This money could now, hypothetically, be devoted to other government issues.

-Samantha Garofalo

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/technology/10energy.html?_r=1