Now multiply that by your company’s headcount and the brilliance of Jen Indovina’s passion for automating the waste reduction process becomes a little contagious.
On Friday, TED Blog’s Alana Herro posted an interview with Indovina, the inventor behind PICOwatt, a wireless smart plug that targets energy wasters and vampire power and can be controlled over the Internet using PCs, tablets and smartphones. She’s on a mission to offload that “behavior change” required to save energy — which we humans are so awful at — and let our electronics handle it.
The funny thing is that while the PICOwatt took home the Best in Green Technology Award at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show, it’s her mini-case study, which she presented at TED Rochester and was based on results from an office implementation, that resonates most from a business perspective (video below). It seems the business community agrees.
According to Indovina, her company Tenrethe (Ethernet spelled backwards!) is busy “making sales to corporate customers, governments, and institutions.” And it’s a good market to be in.
Last week, Buck Consultants (a Xerox subsidiary) released the results of a survey that found that 69 percent of American businesses had formal green programs in 2010, up from 53 percent in 2009. Also last week, IBM closed on its acquisition of Tririga, a smart buildings software maker, heralding boom times for tech companies that can help businesses save energy on their real estate assets. Though not in the smart buildings space per se, Tenrethe’s network-friendly platform could potentially drive efficiency to new heights by bridging the energy monitoring and management gulf between facilities managers and end users.
Check out Indovina’s talk below and ask yourself, are savings of up to $2 a day per employee enough to get smart about your company’s energy usage?
Slashing energy costs by $2 per employee per day http://bit.ly/hiB2Rr
Not likely. Not even close. The numbers do not add up. She is selling snake oil. The X-10 modules do the same thing for 10% the cost. This is not new, just new to people that do not read.
Sorry to tell you Jeff, but it’s not Snake Oil, for buildings with strict historic codes, wireless technology is the only way to retrofit energy efficiency hardware.
Don’t buildings without X-10 deserve a chane to be green? And, yes the numbers DO add up, the standard use-life of our devices continues to outgun our gains in power efficiency to operate them. Or just read “Sustainable Energy without the hot air” – great book.