I've been a little busy lately and don't have time for a full-blown blog post, so again we'll have to settle for some quick hits that I've taken note of lately:

• Recently I've been reading Greg Pahl's fascinating book, The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook.  It's full of fascinating practical information about medium-scale renewable energy projects, which citizen groups and municipalities can undertake.  Pahl is a champion of Community Supported Energy (CSE), a co-operative model of renewable energy production not unlike the more popular Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).  Most CSAs I'm familiar with are well behind the technological curve and could benefit tremendously from even simple web-based technology for facilitating membership signup and horizontal communications; I'm sure the same could be said for CSEs.  (I've been thinking about websites for community supported agriculture for a long time, but I never seem to get the chance to put together a good CSA website solution.)
• OpenADR is an open-source demand-response system.  As far as I know demand-response is really making its presence felt only in the enterprise and commercial sectors, so hopefully OpenADR will help expand the market to include a wider swatch of commercial buildings as well as some residential buildings.  (h/t Earth2Tech)
• OpenPDC appears to be a promising open-source platform for aggregating and analyzing the health of the electrical grid, courtesy of the TVA.  (h/t Earth2Tech, again)
• PeoplePower is working on an open source wireless home automation network solution, which could be a great improvement on the elegant, but somewhat hobbyist-only, solution that is Tweet-A-Watt. (h/t Earth2Tech for the hat trick)
• EcoFactor is developing a smart thermostat, meant to reduce energy needed for space heating.  I'd be fascinated to see those algorithms!  (h/t - guess who?)
• Scientific Conservation, Inc. has recently released software to predict building energy use accurately.  The idea is to provide additional motivation for efficiency retrofits, by demonstrating return on investment more effectively than traditional modeling approaches.  That's well and good, but it makes me wonder whether or not it would be possible to use the tool in concert with a large database of information about buildings - from a municipal government's licensing board, let's say.  That would make it possible to identify a large set of buildings which would benefit from retrofits rapidly, and to prioritize the retrofits based on current or projected energy use.
• Mariah Power has released an incredibe iPhone application to measure wind speed in your backyard, to assess the feasibility of placing a turbine there.

I'm beginning to think I should pull together a library of open source projects on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and the like.  That could be a fun project for the holidays!

Note: Boston Green Drinks will be discussing the provisions of the Boxer/Kerry bill, and its impact on the environment, with Ben Wright, the Global Warming Advocate at Environment Massachusetts, on Nov. 3 at 7 pm.  I hope to see you there!

Last week, Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry introduced the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act in the US Senate.  This is the Senate's version of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), also known as the Waxman/Markey bill, which passed the House in June.  The legislation would, among other things, set a nationwide renewable energy portfolio and create a cap-and-trade system to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Although I write a lot about ideas for renewable energy and energy efficiency which can be pursued by individuals, organizations, and businesses with minimal governmental support, the fact is that major governmental action is needed to stop catastrophic climate change.  The problem is simply too huge to leave to the private sector.  Moreover, current government policies encourage the unsustainable practices, including dirty fuel energy production, excessive driving at low mileage, and deforestation, which are the main factors in catastrophic climate change; the government should reverse this destructive path.  With regards to Congressional action specifically, climate change will have massive impacts on interstate commerce and national security, and it is therefore Congress's constitutional responsibility to take action on this issue.

The immediate task before anyone who wants to avoid catastrophic climate change is to push the Senate to pass the Boxer/Kerry bill, and to push the Congress to merge the two bills and to pass the final legislation.  Ideally, the final passage would be accomplished before the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, set for Dec. 10.

If you've paid any attention to the debate on health care reform, you're no doubt aware that passing major legislation in Congress, and especially in the Senate, is not a piece of cake.  There are dozens if not hundreds of hurdles, amendments, votes, procedural questions, and sundry sub-plots to track.  There are massive, and in some cases very wealthy, interests who want to have a say.  There are lines in the sand, and it's often quite difficult to tell when they have been crossed, who is acting in good faith, what's just a feint, and what is going on behind the scenes.

With regards to the Boxer/Kerry bill, it appears that there will be at least a few major issues with the bill:

• Will the bill, in its final form, allow the EPA to continue regulating greenhouse gases?
• Will the bill encourage green collar job creation, thereby spreading renewable energy prosperity broadly?
• What numerical targets will be set for renewable energy creation and emission reductions, and how aggressive will the timetables be?
• Will the bill rely on carbon capture, or support natural gas as an intermediary solution, in emission reductions?
• When will the bill pass, and how will the Senate bill be merged with the House bill?

Clearly, the debate on this bill will be just as complicated, if not more so, than the debate on health care reform, and a great deal of work needs to be done to track the progress on these issues, and to hold elected officials accountable for their actions.

Luckily, there are plentiful tools available to organize this massive and complex stream of information, and there is already a decent-sized body of practice in tracking legislation and holding leaders accountable, particularly within the progressive blogosphere and other social media forums.  But it seems to me that blogs, wikis, social media streams, and Twitter feeds, for all their power, are not really sophisticated enough to capture the complexity of the climate change debate.  All of these sources have the main weakness that they are mainly suited to highlighting one thing at a time, whereas the climate change debate requires us to keep track of multiple things at once - the five questions I listed above, and perhaps a few others.  It would be nice to have a site where a visitor could get a quick glimpse of the status and recmmended action for each of these issues.

The best infrastructure for creating such a complex site, in my opinion, is Drupal, the content management system used in almost every Lightbulb First project.  As it happens, there is an excellent distribution of Drupal targeted specifically at supporting online newspaper sites, called ProsePoint.

I'd like to see someone create and maintain a ProsePoint site whose main focus is to track stories on the Boxer/Kerry bill, and to organize civic action to push legislators to vote the right way on the bill.  Now, Prosepoint is mainly intended as a tool to manage news sites, not to oragnize civic action, but it's not hard to imagine extending the basic software a bit to incorporate activism.  One approach would be to add a "Suggested action" field to the Store content type, and then to extend the theme to highlight actions alongside the story body in some way.  Another approach would be to create a separate "Action item" content type, and to allow those content items to be attached to stories.  This latter approach might work better, as it would enable the creation of different types of actions - e.g. signing a petition, calling Senators, donating to an activist group or to a Senator who helped push the legislation along, etc.  It would also allow the site editors to highlight important actions over the course of several stories.

What I like about ProsePoint is its native support for multiple channels, which is vitally important for the climate change debate.  Channels are found on almost every news site these days; the channels at the top of the ProsePoint demo site include "National", "World", and "Business".  To track the questions I listed above for the Boxer/Kerry bill, it would be easy enough to create channels with titles like "EPA authority", "Green collar", "Renewable energy standard", "Carbon capture", and "Legislative calendar" (although I'm sure that someone with more experience managing online news sites could come up with something a bit snappier.)

Moreover, the software includes personalization capabilities, which appear to be focused around allowing visitors to easily access the stories most interesting to them through a "My Magazine" page.  Unfortunately the documentation for these features is not too clear, but these features could be a good foundation for giving visitors the tools to focus on the stories and actions most interesting to them, and also to recruit their friends and personal networks to support the elements of the bill they are most passionate about.

The biggest challenge in running such a site would be time and money.  If (and this is a rather big "if") the bill is indeed passed by Dec. 10, then the time frame for launching, stocking, and marketing a major new site focused solely on the Boxer/Kerry bill is indeed quite short.  And don't forget that we need to account for the time to incorporate or find an existing organizational home, untangle legal issues, put together a decent design, etc.

On top of that, such a site would require at minimum a part-time contributor, and probably more like one or two full-time staff.  Even for a couple of months, at a decent salary for each staff person, the costs for the site could run into the $30-40,000 range.  Unless the site manages an exceptional amount of traffic, online advertising certainly won't cover those costs.  Instead, I would suggest corporate or organizational sponsorship.  There are certainly no shortage of public interest groups for whom passage of the bill would be priceless, and there are now several major corporations lobbying for aggressive passage of the bill.  Beyond these big-name brands, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of nascent renewable energy and energy efficiency companies for whom the bill is a major boon, and who should be willing to kick in a little money to promote passage of the bill.

Even if it's not feasible to launch such a site in time to catch the major part of the debate on the Boxer/Kerry bill, it's still worth thinking about the idea of for-profit news/action sites that rely on sponsorships.  The Boxer/Kerry bill will not be the last piece of legislation dealing with catastrophic climate change.  At a minimum, the Senate will have to ratify the Copenhagen treaty once it's negotiated, and Congress will probably revisit the issue at some point in the next few years.  Moreover, states and cities are sure to continue to take action on any number of green issues, including green job initiatives, building codes, transportation policies and food system reforms.  Preparing for these debates now will only strengthen the hand of ordinary folks who want to protect the environment, and will help create the structural reform necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change.

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times ran a fascinating piece on a new kind of financial institution: the green bank, which offers lower loan rates to finance energy efficiency and sustainability projects of various kinds.  It seems that the new banks are having some trouble staying afloat, partially due to the generally dismal economic times and also because, as with many businesses, start-up costs are high in the first few years of a bank's existence.

The Times quotes Bert Ely, a banking consultant from Virginia, who is skeptical about green banking in general:

"I'm not convinced this is ultimately going to be very profitable," he said, noting that the green banks appeared to have relatively high operating expenses — perhaps, Mr. Ely said, because of the need for specialized expertise among loan officers, among other factors. Also, providing discounted interest rates, while good for borrowers, can detract from a bank’s income, Mr. Ely observed.

The latter point is self-evident, but the first is questionable, or it can be for certain kinds of green projects.  Replacing incandescent lightbulbs for compact flourescent lights, or better yet LED lights, is a sure-fire way to reduce electric usage, and the return on investment is well-known.  More complicated projects, like insulating a basement or an attic, may well raise some detailed questions about the kind of insulation or sealant to use, but the costs can be "rounded up" without too much trouble.  It's a bit more difficult to determine how much energy will be saved due to a given insulation project, but here again, some relatively straightforward tests carried out by a trusted energy auditor can provide good estimates, which can in turn give a good idea for the return on investment.

I think the real issues that are troubling green banks are a little more mundane.  While I've never visited such a bank, my guess is that all of the banks listed in the Times article have faily sophisticated marketing efforts, modern green branch offices, and all the other trappings of a modern green business.  All of that costs money, and in a cutthroat industry like finance, high overhead means either higher loan rates or lower profit margins, or both.  Moreover, like many banks, green banks are probably most interested in relatively large loans, whose interest rates are likely to generate profits necessary to offset the cost of the loan officer's time in processing the loan.  However, a vast number of energy efficiency projects are very small-capital loans - a whole household full of lightbulbs might not amount to more than a few hundred dollars, and an insulation project can easily come in under one thousand dollars.  No bank with a nice branch office will ever bother with a loan that small; there's no way to make a profit on it.

However, some of these low-capital projects are also very, very safe investments, so long as the borrowers are trustworthy and solvent.  The time to recover the costs of a CFL project or an insulation project might be measured in months, and the recovery time for a hot water heater replacement might be only a few years (especially if utility discounts are available).

In other words, this is an ideal space for micro-loans or low-overhead lending operations.  Using a system similar to the Kiva API, it would be possible to build a website to support peer-to-peer micro-lending for low-capital green projects with near-certain positive return.  These loans would probably have some fair amount of risk - all loans have some risk, and in order to keep overhead down, it would probably not be possible to thoroughly vet borrowers.  Then again, the low size of the loans would keep risk down, and reputation systems could further mitigate risk.  Such a system could help finance a high volume of relatively low-capital green projects, which is exactly what we need to fight global warming.

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.

Last night at Green Drinks Boston, the buzz was about WattsOn, which is DIY Kyoto's gadget for monitoring home energy use.  I've heard a bit about this sleek little gadget before, although I haven't investigated.  I just took a gander at the website, and I'm mighty impressed!

WattsOn is a gadget that displays your current energy usage, using a sensor and transmitter which hook in to your electric meter.  The device also comes with software which allows you to monitor your usage over time, and to plug into a community of other WattsOn users.  Although I haven't tried out the device (it's apparently available in the UK, but not in the US), it appears to be designed exceptionally well - it could be a nice conversation-starter on a coffee table - and the software seems to handle most of the typical reports you'd expect.

As far as I can tell, the community tools attached to WattsOn are fairly basic - they allow you to see cumulative energy and monetary savings for the community as a whole, but that's about it.  There are plenty of other things that a community of people trying to reduce their energy usage can do - for example, review and recommend energy-efficient appliances, swap tips on the best ways to implement energy-saving practices, and so on.  Additionally, I can imagine a number of other ways to make the historical usage data available to users - e.g., over email, text message, and so forth.  Good data analysis might also reveal patterns that could help home energy users find additional savings above those offered by the typical measures, like replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents.

While WattsOn is definitely a more comprehensive reporter than Tweet-A-Watt, it would be nice to get a breakdown of energy usage by room or appliance.  Depending on how it's implemented, Tweet-A-Watt is capable of creating that kind of breakdown, while WattsOn only displays aggregated usage.  On the other hand, WattsOn also takes 288 meter readings a day, so it's usually possible to reasonably approximate the reason for various spikes.  For example, if you turn on the clothes dryer around 6 pm, and see a big spike in the usage data starting at 6 and lasting for about 45 minutes, it's probably a good sign that the dryer was the cause of that spike.

WattsOn is an excellent tool in the energy efficiency arsenal.  While it's not yet available in the US, I hope it jumps across the pond soon!

Although weatherization certainly requires a lot of roll-up-your-sleeves, get-your-hands-dirty work, it's also a very data-intensive process.  Alongisde their expertise about such practical matters as the relative effectiveness of storm windows and rigid foam insulation, weatherizers must also be able to manage a lot of different kinds of data.  The way things are done today, a lot of that data is stored in someone's head, on a piece of paper, or possibly in an old legacy desktop application.  Using mobile applications on a smart phone, weatherizers could see dramatic improvements in their work processes, while making the weatherization process more accessible.

A weatherization project starts with an assessment, or energy audit, to identify problems that might cause a home or building to be inefficient.  For each problem the audit produces, there are usually at least a few different solutions which can be applied, with each solution having tradeoffs in terms of cost, efficiency improvements, and long-term effect on the "livability" of the house or building.  The weatherizer and building owner must come to an agreement about which problems will be fixed.  Prior to getting to work, the weatherizer must gather the tools, materials, and safety equipment needed for the work.  The weatherization project itsef often reveals further problems, or sometimes requires future maintenance and follow-up.  It's frequently important to keep track of heat and electric usage, both before and after the audit - both as a way of demonstrating the project's return on investment, and to validate that the work was completed correctly.  In many cases, the building owner or weatherizer must carefully track expenses in order to qualify for government or utility rebates.

At every step of this process, there's a lot of data to track.  That can be a stumbling block for many weatherization projects.  It can introduce errors, excess cost, and complexity that can make a weatherization project less effective at reducing energy use.

To solve these problems, we need good software that is closely integrated with the realities of weatherization work.  It needs to be lightweight, flexible, and mobile.  It needs to account for architectural techniques and possible sources of energy leaks in a wide variety of homes and buildings.  It needs to support rich record-keeping, integrating tightly with mobile cameras and utilizing voice annotations.  It needs to integrate with third-party data services, for retrieving and managing data like water and electricitiy usage.  And above all, it needs to be easy to use.

A mobile software platform like this could do much more than make life easier for weatherizers - although that would be an important goal in its own right.  Through distribution in venues like the Apple iPhone store, such a program could also inspire a wave of do-it-yourself weatherization, by dispersing weatherization know-how.  Moreover, such an application could also provide valuable feedback data to policymakers and utilities, helping them identify areas where more weatherization work, or more subsidies and other incentives, are needed.

There is already some energy audit software available, like the Department of Energy's Weatherization Assistant.  That is a good start, but the last release of the assistant was in September 2006.  We are long overdue for modernization of weatherization software.

This weekend, the Home Energy Efficiency Team held an energy efficiency "barn-raising" at the Cambridge Community Center.  Dozens of volunteers gathered to take on a variety of energy efficiency tasks, ranging from replacing incandescent light bulbs with CFLs, to installing storm windows and rigid foam insulation.

Over the past month I've attended a series of leadership trainings with HEET (which is part of the reason this blog is so heavily focused on energy efficiency ideas), funded by a generous grant from MassSAVE.  Yesterday was my first crack at leading an efficiency team.  I served as the "right-hand man" on the caulking team, led by award-winning painter Jason Taylor.  Jason is a talented, skilled, and knowledgable (to say nothing of entertaining) contractor, so I confess I didn't do much more than fetch rags and move ladders around.  I got in my fair share of caulking, though, and at one point I found a gaping hole in the wall that was obscured by a big play structure.  Jason showed me and a fellow leader how to seal up the hole with plaster-of-Paris, so we were able to take care of what would otherwise have been a giant leak in the center's energy bills this winter.

Yesterday's barn-raising was a lot of fun, and I think we were able to save a lot of energy.  The Center will be warmer and more cost-effective this winter, meaning that we've put a small dent in global warming while helping a worthwhile community organization.  And to top it all off, I got my photo taken with Cambridge City Councillor, and Lightbulb First client, Henrietta Davis!

With energy efficiency, as with many other problems, it's often helpful to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty (very dirty, if you're caulking).  That helps get the creative juices flowing, and helps expose some of the practical, in-the-trenches problems that are often the inspiration for great ideas.  I've got another blog post on the way, for example, that was inspired by an effiency audit training I attended a couple of weeks ago.  So get out there and weatherize some buildings!

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.

A couple of months ago, I had the distinct pleasure of visiting Boston, MA-based EnerNOC, a demand-response company which arranges deals between utility companies and commercial buildings to reduce energy usage within commercial buildings in order to prevent avoid peak power usage.  EnerNOC negotiates contracts in which commercial buildings reduce their energy usage whenever power usage within a utility's jurisdiction threatens to overwhelm the grid; building owners are paid for their compliance with the program.

One of the secrets to EnerNOC's success is their ability to interface with building management systems (BMS) at commercial buildings via remote communication.  A buildling managment system is an automated system for managing a variety of systems within a commerical building, including, among others, lighting and HVAC.  If technically possible, EnerNOC attempts to add a demand-response control sequence to its partners' BMS, so that when utilities request a reduction in power usage, EnerNOC can push a switch and automatically reduce demand in a number of different buildings, without requiring human intervention.  The company takes steps to ensure that the demand-response control sequences does not interfere with the business needs of its partners.

The success that EnerNOC has enjoyed - they have quickly managed to generate the equivalent of a gigawatt of clean power in just a couple of years - demonstrates the untapped potential of BMS to reduce energy usage in a variety of settings, and thereby to help address the global warming crisis.  Unfortunately, these systems are usually proprietary systems which are tightly coupled with the hardware devices they control.  The proprietary nature of BMS stifles innovation within this sector of the software market, because it prevents third-party software developers from inspecting and improving the software.

For similar reasons, third-party service providers are inhibited from introducing novel uses of BMS to reduce energy usage.  To begin with a third-party provider must have familiarity with the BMS.  On top of that, third party providers may wish to enhance a BMS to suit their energy efficiency services; in many cases, such enhancements are simply not possible.  While EnerNOC has managed to overcome these limitations, there is plenty of room for improvement in the market.  EnerNOC's partners tend to be very large commercial energy consumers, and, to my knowledge, there are no similar demand-response companies serving medium and small commercial energy consumers, or residential consumers.

An open specification for building management hardware, coupled with an open source building management system, could pave the way to improved energy use management in these sectors.  Such a platform would allow a wide array of providers to gain expertise in building management systems, and to develop improvements and value-added services for these systems, in much the same way that EnerNOC has done for large-scale commercial energy consumers.  Naturally, strong security measures would be absolutely crucial to such a platform; the opportunities for mischief in a BMS are significant.  While some commerical building managers might be suspicious of an open source system controlling such sensitive systems as lighting and HVAC, I would argue that open source systems generally can offer much more rigorous security assurances than proprietary systems - wide exposure to the source code that many people have the opportunity to audit the software and fix security bugs quickly, as opposed to the typically much smaller groups in proprietary development settings.

There has been some progress in development of an open source BMS.  The OpenLynx project promises to offer such a system.  In fact, a new release of OpenLynx was due yesterday.  While the SourceForge project page for OpenLynx doesn't yet include any source code, the project made an impressive show at the Connectivity Week conference in Santa Clara earlier this month.  Hopefully, open source building management projects will continue to gather momentum, enabling third-party providers to organize additional sectors of the building energy management market.

Weatherization is an ongoing process. You can install a storm window in the early winter, but chances are that you'll want to remove it in the summer. If you don't remember to re-install the storm window when winter rolls around again, your previous weatherization project was in vain.

This simple example is just one of many. There are plenty of weatherization tasks that require ongoing attention on the part of homeowners: checking thermostat temperatures, checking for water leaks, and everyone's favorite: turning off the lights. For the most part these are simple tasks that only require a few minutes every week or month. But they're also fairly boring, and difficult to integrate into a busy life.

To keep track with weatherization goals, homeowners need a convenient "green task" reminder system - a tool which can keep them up-to-date on the various green maintenance tasks they need to take care of on a regular basis. This tool could take a lot of different forms - it could have a web-based control panel; it could integrate with Outlook or the iPhone; it could send emails and text message alerts; it could produce an RSS feed or add status messages to a Facebook account one tasks are ticked off. It could do all of these things.

Most importantly, a green task reminder system needs to be relevant to each homeowner's particular circumstances - there's no need to remind someone who doesn't have storm windows to re-install them in early November. For that reason, such a system would need to gather some up-front data about what kind of weatherization measures the homeowner has taken, and perhaps provide an interface for a green contractor or weatherization consultant to add additional information. Once the basic information is provided, the system will be able to limit the set of reminders to thos which apply.

There's no need for such a system to limit itself to weatherization tasks, although those are among the most important tasks. It would be easy to adapt such a system to provide car and bicycle owners with reminders for keeping their vehicle in good and efficient condition, or to help urban farmers keep tabs on their plots.

It would be easy enough to monetize a system like this using subscriptions. A more exotic monetization model would sell not just the reminders, but the services as well. For example, the system could automatically schedule a visit from a local green contractor to assist with routine maintenance tasks, and reap a commission from each successfully scheduled appointment. That approach is probably more lucrative, but also a good deal riskier.

There are a lot of different ways to remind people of important green tasks. Hopefully, a variety of approaches will emerge, giving people the tools that best suit their needs and help them save energy most effectively.