Comment by leon_sbt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leon_sbt | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Make an app that gives push notifications to users about their energy consumption on a real-time/daily/weekly/monthly basis. All this is tied into regional gasoline/electricity prices, that way you can output $ figures for everything. Release it for free. Think Google Analytics for personal energy($) consumption.

Tie in data from home via sense.com sensor, car travel data via google location services and a user selected vehicle.

Then give tips to user on better habits. Such as putting home in "eco" mode when you leave via Nest, or converting house to LED, etc.

Like if you change your Ford F-250 to a Civic, you will save $2000 a year based on your driving habits and distance.etc.

Or after driving your car. It says you spent about $10 in gas and 30 mins by driving just now.

The thing that inspired me was was the real time MPG gauge on my Honda Civic. It single handedly had the greatest MPG increase for my car. Since I felt the "pain" ($$) of smashing the throttle every time.

When people use their electricity at home, they don't feel " real time pain" when they turn on their 5kw AC unit or 3kw water heater. It's a crazy amount of power. They only feel once a month, when they get their energy bill for $200+ a month.

In conclusion, game-ify the hell out of dropping an end user's individual energy consumption number. By reducing energy demand at the source, then it's much easier to swallow eco friendly options.

For example, with poor energy consumption habits you may need a 10kw solar array @ a cost of 20k). But if you drop the user's average energy consumption. You can have the same quality of life at 5kw solar installtion @ $10k. Spending $10k is easier to swallow than $20k. (I made up all the $ numbers, I'm not sure where pricing is at now)

Well these are my random thoughts, I hope they inspire you.

Thanks for this. I don't own a house and I live in a poorly insulated apartment building that gets full sun all day most of the year. It's a great candidate for solar panels but mostly out of my control. I already drive a civic and work from home, eating as sustainably as budget allows.

I'm wondering if there are some ideas out there on tackling the deeper cause. People are living longer, population is still growing and even if we were all 100% on renewable energy we would still be destroying the planet; the bugs are disappearing, the oceans are overfished, the bees are dying and we're even extracting an unsustainable amount of _gravel_ for goodness sake.

Something along the lines of changing the economic incentives to consume and expand, because short of terrible war or calamity, people in developing countries are still going to want refrigerators, cars, and beef and people in developed coutries aren't going to want to get rid of those.

> I'm wondering if there are some ideas out there on tackling the deeper cause.

One rough way to think about it is I=PAT, where I is total environmental impact, P is population, A is affluence per capita, and T is environmental impact per unit of affluence.

Population has grown exponentially, per capita affluence has grown dramatically, and reductions in the last factor T haven't been able to keep up.

Worse, if you consider the "goals" of our major systems of economic organisation - or at least the observed behaviour - they aren't set up to minimise I, or even really consider it - it's more like our ways of large scale cooperation are focused on economic growth, i.e. roughly trying to maximise P*A.

If you live in an affluent western "free market" democracy it is probably politically difficult to push for major reduction or limits to population P or affluence A.

In terms of what can be done, it's probably better to focus on smaller scope/smaller scale problems. Not realistic for one person to solve the whole world's problems. If you can help push politically to regulate environmental impact in your area of local politics, that's probably very helpful. Not necessarily aligned with skills as an engineer, but this is probably more valuable than building something within current political/market framework.

If you're able to set up a small business or not for profit that is able to help others save money with side effects of reducing environmental impact, that's probably also helpful. This is less ambitious and isn't tackling the main root causes, but is something that is more in your control.

Awesome idea. Would be cool to hook it into a community of like-minded eco-friendly people that share their tips/tricks for daily usage based on the products you have in common.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com