ecofriend.com

Now, A Web-Controlled Solar Home

gridpoint

It is well-known that coal, the state rock of Utah, is the source of heat and electricity to millions of business houses as well as personal homes in that state. According to reports from Western Resource Advocates, a charitable environmental law and policy organization, power plants that use coal as fuel, supply almost 95 percent of the total electricity in Utah.

While admitting the usefulness of coal as an energy source and the practicality of using it extensively, Ken Schreiner, a resident of Salt Lake City (along with his wife,Abbie), also sounds out a warning. Schreiner says:

On the surface, it makes a lot of sense to use this resource for energy and stay on the utility grid. The problem is, when coal burns it creates a lot of air pollution.

Worried about the pollution problems that the excessive use of coal might pose, Ken and Abbie decided to come up with an alternative source of energy. Fortunately, they were located at a place that had sunlight in abundance, with more than 300 sunny days in a year. So, the couple decided to tap and harvest this rich, abundant and eco-friendly energy source to power their own home.

Ken and Abbie’s experiment started with the installation of tracking solar panels on a backyard pole. The rest of the required setup was made in the Schreiners’ garage, and the couple could manage the entire system through their PC.

The most important part of the entire setup, the GridPoint Connect (that resembles a small refrigerator in shape), relays (via Internet) data regarding the energy consumption patterns of the Schreiners, to the GridPoint operations center. The couple can then access this data in a tabular form on their computer through GridPoint Central, a private energy management web portal.

GridPoint Central helps to indicate the amount of solar power generated by the panels and sent to the utility grid. It also shows the amount of energy used by the couple, and helps to pinpoint the devices that consume the bulk of the energy. In a clever move, Ken managed to cut down the total energy consumption at night by half, simply by plugging the devices that could be completely turned off to a surge strip.

Apart from facilitating the use of solar energy, GridPoint also helps in creating solar backups that can be used in batteries, to run air conditioners, refrigerators, or such devices. This unique system also helps users to reap the benefits of energy saving utility programs (net-metering, load management), according to Brian Golden, Vice-President of GridPoint’s product strategy. Gridpoint enables the users to locate the periods when power available from the local utility is the cheapest, and make prior plans to run certain pre-determined devices during those ‘off-peak’ hours.

The net-metering programs of GridPoint helps users to send any surplus power that might have been generated, to the local utility company. This automatically reduces the utility bills of households by significant amounts. This innovative technique has indeed helped people like the Schreiners evolve from mere energy-users to energy-producers. Preventing pollution, generating and sharing energy and saving on utility bills as well—GridPoint has taken ‘green living’ to a different, much higher plane indeed.

Source: Electronic House

Today's Top Articles:

Scroll to Top