Green Button offered by PG&E and SDG&E

This post was revised 2/12/2012


Last week, the White House announced the Green Button initiative.  The goal of the initiative is to

provide electricity customers with easy access to their energy usage data in a consumer-friendly and computer-friendly format via a “Green Button” on electric utilities’ website. With this information in hand, customers can take advantage of innovative energy apps to help them understand their energy usage and find ways to reduce electricity consumption and shrink bills, all while ensuring they retain privacy and security.
-Aneesh Chopra U.S. Chief Technology Officer

The first two utilities to offer the service are Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) and San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E). I was curious about the data available so I convinced a current PG&E customer to let me take a look at her energy usage information (thanks Mom!).

The Green Button provided me with a csv file which looked just like this sample file in the screenshot I have posted to the right.  In the case of the file I downloaded, data went back to mid-2008, which I assume is when my mom’s SmartMeter was installed.  There was a separate file available for natural gas usage, with a similar format.

The Green Button exported file includes hourly electricity usage.  The program intends to aid cost-effectiveness analyses for energy efficiency or distributed power investments (such as a more efficient boiler or solar panels).  Many residential electricity tariffs include multiple billing determinants, such as a $/kW demand change based on the maximum 15 minutes of demand in a month and a $/kWh energy charge based on hourly energy usage during the entire month.  In addition, both the demand and energy change can vary by the hour of the day.  Energy efficiency and distribute power investments provide energy savings at specific hours of the day and months of the year.  With hourly data, a homeowner or third party provider will be able to make informed decisions on these types of investments.

Overall, I like the effort to make data open and standardize the process to access it.  I am interested to see what third party applications are built to use this information.  My guess is that the green button will make customer cost projections easier and cheaper to generate for residential solar leasing companies such as SolarCity, Sungevity, and SunRun.

Off-grid power in Rajasthan, India

I recently returned from a trip to Rajasthan, India.  While there, I came across an off-grid power opportunity at the Amber Fort near Jaipur.  The fort has a restaurant and gift shop facilities (with a stereo and satellite TV – see the video I took).  The facility is powered by a Cummins diesel genset.

When I saw diesel genset, I became curious about the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for this off-the-grid system.  Here is a spreadsheet where I made some guesses about the system cost.  I came up with a resulting LCOE of $0.3144/kWh for the power from the diesel genset.  I tried to make assumptions that if anything would bias to cost to be lower than what it actually is.  $0.31/kWh is a high price for electricity and provides an attractive opportunity for distributed solar and wind power.  While travelling through India I saw a number of off-grid communities, so I expect India to be a large market for distributed clean power.