Desktop Orb Could Reform Energy Hogs:
Mark Martinez couldn’t get Southern California Edison customers to conserve energy. As the utility’s manager of program development, he had tried alerting them when it was time to dial back electricity use on a hot day — he’d fire off automated phone calls, zap text messages, send emails. No dice.Then he saw an Ambient Orb. It’s a groovy little ball that changes color in sync with incoming data — growing more purple, for example, as your email inbox fills up or as the chance of rain increases. Martinez realized he could use Orbs to signal changes in electrical rates, programming them to glow green when the grid was underused — and, thus, electricity cheaper — and red during peak hours when customers were paying more for power. He bought 120 of them, handed them out to customers, and sat back to see what would happen.
Within weeks, Orb users reduced their peak-period energy use by 40 percent. Why? Because, Martinez explains, the glowing sphere was less annoying and more persistent than a text alert. “It’s nonintrusive,” he says. “It has a relatively benign effect. But when you suddenly see your ball flashing red, you notice.”
Electricity is invisible. That’s why we waste so much of it in the home — leaving rechargers permanently plugged in and electronic devices idling in power-slurping “sleep” modes. We can’t see that our houses account for nearly a quarter of the nation’s energy appetite; we don’t know when the grid is nearing capacity and expensive to use.
So Martinez hacked his customers’ perceptual apparatuses. He made energy visible.