I've written before about the importance of supporting do-it-yourself weatherization projects, and the possibility of creating a simplistic do-it-yourself smart grid at home using the Tweet-a-Watt.  If do-it-yourselfers can reduce and measure their own demand for energy and electricity, how about creating some, too?

A pair of interesting stories making the rounds today are the inspiring story of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, via Change.org, and the Cambridge Energy Alliance's post on do-it-yourself solar.  As a big believer in renewable energy, and particularly in reducing the barriers to renewable energy solutions, I find these stories fascinating and very exciting.

Ready-made commercial solutions for harnessing the wind and the sun to create electricity or provide heat are fairly expensive.  Even rooftop wind turbines sold at hardware stores can cost up to $6,000, before tax incentives kick in (at which point the cost drops to around $4,200).  The CEA blog post above points to a commercially available solar hot air panel which costs "only" $1,500.  That's not chump change!

The good news is that there are lower-cost options available for intrepid hobbyists with a bit of spare time, the Change.org and CEA blog posts suggest.  What we need, I believe, are resources to distribute this knowledge more widely, and to make it easier to find and to put into practice.

The tools to do that online are well within reach.  There are already a handful of web-based resources which already compile information about DIY renewable energy projects - including Discover Solar Energy and Got Wind.  These sites are a great start, but there's still room for improvement.  I'm thinking of a comprehensive interactive website which includes how-to videos, detailed instruction manuals, an online store for the raw materials, a question-and-answers discussion forum, and Digg-style voting to promote the best resources.  Such a site could even incorporate advice for hobbyists who'd like to "go professional" and sell their services to others who would like to purchase low-cost renewable energy, but don't have the time or know-how to take on such a project themselves.  The site could be supported through affiliate sales for raw materials and premium memberships purchased by hobbyists wishing to advertise their services to other enthusiasts.  There's even an opportunity for the site's owners to sell consulting services or run workshops for real estate developers, municipalities, or other entities who wish to deploy low-cost distributed renewable energy on a wide scale.

Large-scale investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency, together with government policies which put a price on carbon, are certainly necessary to make a big difference in solving global warming.  At the same time, there is plenty of room for everyone, from do-it-yourself hobbyists to web developers, to chip in as well.

One of the biggest challenges in greening our economy is green job training.  GreenBiz recently highlighted the efforts of Green for All (one of my favorite green organizations) and the state of California in leading the way on green-collar job training.  I applaud these efforts to develop solid training programs for green-collar jobs, but I believe there are also opportunities for smaller-scale green training.

In particular, I'm thinking about free online videos for simple energy efficiency tasks, like caulking and storm window insulation.  If you search YouTube for "storm window installation", you'll eventually find the following:

This video is actually pretty good, and it's a testimony to the diversity and quality of video available at YouTube (despite all the static).  But it's possible to improve on this user experiene quite a bit, in a number of ways.

I'd like to see a site dedicated exclusively to providing users with instructional videos about weatherization tasks, and perhaps some overview videos that give some high-level information about how weatherization works and why it's important.  Such a site would feature the following:

• The ability to browse videos by type of task and difficulty level
• Multiple videos showcasing different approaches to the same task (e.g. one video for vinyl storm windows, and another for permanent storm windows)
• Ratings and comments to allow users to review a video and provide helpful critiques
• Ecommerce features to allow users to buy related products for their weatherization tasks
• Community features to allow users to get together with others in their area and participate in a weatherization project

Using Drupal and embedded videos with YouTube (together with some helpful Drupal modules like Five Star and Ubercart), it would be relatively easy to build such a site on a low budget.  The revenues for weatherization product sales could help pay for maintenance.

I think the main trick would be driving traffic to the site and keeping users engaged over time.  The site would certainly be targeted towards motivated individuals, who are interested in energy efficiency and like to roll up their sleeves.  While it wouldn't be as comprehensive as a bona fide job training program, such a site would be one more approach to making weatherization projects more common and widespread, and could help contribute to lower energy use.

Tweet-A-Watt is an elegant solution to the problem of tracking electricity.  While the smart grid gathers steam, it's still a long-term project, and many electricity consumers won't see results for several years.  Tweet-A-Watt addresses that problem in the short term.  By combining the Kill-a-Watt power meter, the XBee wireless board, and the Twitter API, Tweet-A-Watt gives consumers a device into which they can plug their appliances, and tweets their energy usage to Twitter.

The basic Tweet-A-Watt system could be improved by making the data available in a semantically meaningful way, i.e. via some sort of structured database for electricity usage which is API-accessible.  With that kind of data infrastructure in place, it would be possible to develop interesting tools that allow consumers to see historical trends in their electric usage; break down usage by outlet and/or appliances; and get alerts whenever their usage exceeds a certain limit.

Fortunately, the Tweet-A-Watt system is very accessible.  Start-up Tweet-A-Watt hardware packs cost $90, and Wattcher, the Tweet-A-Watt software, is open source.  An interested hobbyist could be up and running with Tweet-A-Watt in a weekend, without much trouble.

For wider distribution, it will probably be necessary to make Tweet-A-Watt a bit easier to build, and a bit cheaper - perhaps through a partnership with Kill-a-Watt, or by using a cheaper meter.  There's also a need for software that's a bit easier to use, perhaps using a software-as-a-service (SAAS) business model.  Such a service would allow users to register their Tweet-A-Watt systems, describe the kinds of appliances plugged in to each Tweet-A-Watt, view charts and graphs of their usage, and then receive alerts whenever usage jumps beyond some absolute or relative limit.  The software could even integrate with users' Facebook accounts, to let their friends know when they saved electricity thanks to Tweet-A-Watt.

While I think a SAAS model would be the easiest way to create a sustainable, accessible data store of electricity usage, the software could also be distributed as an open source web application, which motivated users could install on their own private web servers.  Neither the code nor the database structure for this kind of software is likely to be very complex, and probably won't require very sophisticated maintenance.

I'm always eager to see low-cost, accessible solutions like Tweet-A-Watt emerge, and I'm even more excited about the prospect of derivative services that make those solutions easy-to-use.  Making energy efficiency tools readily available is an important step in reducing our overall energy usage.