Jay Nick has developed a couple of handy online tools for Power Smart Pricing. One of them is the "stoplight" tool featured at the top of the sidebar on the PSP Blog. He also developed a similar tool that mimics the Pricelight. The color of the orb changes depending on the price of electricity that hour. The tools can be embedded in a website (like this one) or it can be placed on your Google homepage.
He also developed a toolbar for Firefox web browsers. Once you download the software a bar showing the time/date and the price of electricity will automatically be displayed on your web browser. This is a very handy way to be able to see the prices all the time without having them in the way. For example, just a glance tells me that the price is currently 3.766 cents per kWh (current flat rate price: roughly 8 cents per kWh)
We recently had a conversation with him and he pointed us in the direction of a smart thermostat called ecobee. It takes advantage of a large display to make all its functions very user friendly. Like a traditional programmable thermostat you can set up a program to automatically manage your house's temperature.
It adds wifi so you can manage your household systems through a website. This would give you the added advantage of being able to change your program while you were away from the house. For customers with hourly electricity pricing this would be a nice feature to allow you to lower your cooling temperature during a higher priced time.
The next development with smart thermostats would be the ability to program the system to automatically respond to different price signals. For example, if the price for electricity is 6 cents and below keep the house at a particular temperature and so on. As variable pricing programs continue to emerge, so too will the tools. Many thanks to Jay Nick for advancing the ball.
http://www.jaynick.com
To his Firefox toolbars: http://www.jaynick.com/FirefoxAdd-ons.php
- Download the Ameren DAP toolbar to get price information directly into your Firefox web browser.
To the orb tool: http://www.jaynick.com/images/Ameren.svg
To the smart thermostat: www.ecobee.com
April 21, 2009
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