Weasel Shit For Fun & Profit
My new Current Cost meter arrived today. The CC128 is much the same as the original Current Cost meter, but slightly better looking. Under the facelift it offers the chance to monitor several sensors around the home which has possibilities for things like water usage and smart thermostats, but today I’ve been fascinated with the developments of the Current Cost crowd and the National Grid.
It starts with Pachube.com. The idea is pretty simple - you provide a data feed of anything (number of bananas consumed, watts of electricity, temperature, socks lost, etc) to Pachube and it will sit there and graph it until kingdom come. You then share or re-use that feed to another system as XML or CSV, effectively patching a tube of data from one device to another. Hence the name ‘Pachube’.
This might seem daft, but I think I have just have seen the light. I publish my electricity usage and kitchen temperature on pachube http://www.pachube.com/feeds/1202
“Why would you do that?”, you’re saying. Well, you do have a point: it’s not useful to anyone but me. But what if I wanted to compare the nation’s demand for electricity with mine, I could just take this feed: http://www.pachube.com/feeds/1228 which is a live feed of demand straight from the National Grid. One person did the work of scaping & publishing this feed but now anyone can use it. All I’d need to do is superimpose the data on my graph and immediately I can see how I compare to the national average. (I don’t watch Eastenders so you won’t see me switching the kettle on ater the ‘doof doofs’). Ok, so it’s ultimately only useful to me, but having it on a public URL in a standard format would save me many hours trying to do it myself. That’s if I’d even thought of it until today (thanks to Dale Lane who’s already started and finished it).
So far so geeky, but given this infrastructure I thought it might soon be possible to know the best times to use the National Grid. Had I been paying attention at Oxford Geek Night #10 rather than drinking beer, I’d know that Tom Dyson of Torchbox already did that: http://caniturniton.com/
Take this a step further. Imagine you’re a computer literate Dick Strawbridge, generating your own electricity using a waterwheel, biofuel made of your own poo, and a pack of wild stoats on an exercise wheel. You don’t actually buy much electricity at all, your weaselwheel providing most of your needs, instead you monitor the demand and price (on http://www.pachube.com/feeds/1245). When the high demand alarm goes off, you quickly (automatically) switch your electric over to put current back into the grid, becoming a power station yourself. At the highest demand times you could produce an income, or at the very least an offset against your bill. Faster, stoats, FASTER!
At the moment although you can sell electricity back to the grid, the buy/sell price is fixed at a flat-rate per quarter rather than on-demand second-by-second, but as the technology and access to the data develops I hope we see forward-thinking energy companies making minute-by-minute tariffs and creating an electricity market.
If enough people generated their own electricity, a generating co-op could be created. We could reduce our reliance on the big power stations and start to live more sustainably, buying our electricity from the bloke over the road. The one with the dubious-smelling house full of stoats.
