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!

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.