Six Massachusetts communities and municipally-owned electric companies from Danvers to North Attleboro are poised to pilot a new technology as part of an energy efficiency initiative.
And they will be using new technology developed by a Gloucester-based company.
The Gloucester-based company is GroundedPower, and its Web-based "Customer Engagement System" is designed to pair real-time energy monitoring with Internet-based tools that should guide consumers toward deeper and more sustainable energy savings. The CES technology delivers real-time information on electricity consumption, and encourages customers to cut electricity use through goal setting, rewards, and comparative results shared among the towns.
The six municipal light plants participating are Braintree, Danvers, Hingham, North Attleboro, Wakefield and Wellesley. The cooperative program will seek to reduce average monthly electricity use and peak demand among participants by an average of 10 percent or more.
Some 300 homes — 50 in each town, along with a number of municipal buildings — will be provided with GroundedPower's software linked either to the company's building monitor or to a smart meter.
The pilot program will begin in November, with installation of wireless energy monitors in homes and municipal buildings and will run for at least a year, energy officials said.
Paul Cole, CEO and founder of GroundedPower, said the Customer Engagement System is designed to place energy use into a larger social context.
"Goals, tasks to achieve goals, timely and relevant feedback, rewards, and the ability to measure one's progress against others are all important factors," said Cole, whose company was founded in 2008. "Our system pulls these elements together and presents them in a very systematic, easy-to-use way to achieve deeper, more sustainable savings," said Cole, who has 20 years of experience in the field of communication technology as a founder and CEO of Vista Associates, research manager and product developer at Lotus, a visiting researcher at MIT, and a manager at Digital Equipment Corp.
Cole's GroundedPower co-founders include Carl Gustin — who serves as company president and has more than 30 years of energy-related experience, including as a senior vice president at Boston Edison and senior executive at the U.S. Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — and Mike Bukhin, who serves as vice president of engineering and as a software engineer. He worked previously as senior engineer at QuitNet, at Vista Associates, and as a researcher at Microsoft Research with 15 years of experience in interactive technology.
"What attracted us to GroundedPower's technology is that it goes well beyond other home monitoring and in-house display systems, many of which we've tried in the past," said John Tzimorangas, general manager of Hingham Municipal Light Plant. "We think GroundedPower's customer engagement system will achieve significant energy savings as customers set goals, discover opportunities for savings and are recognized for results. This benefits both our customers and our communities as we look to reduce energy and environmental impacts."
The home area networks will include wireless monitors and a wireless gateway that uploads real-time data to Web-enabled software. This system will be installed in each participating home and building. In the pilot project in Danvers, smart meters will be used in place of the GroundedPower monitor.
Gustin said he and his GroundedPower colleagues, who employ four people full-time and a half-dozen part-timers, are also in talks with other utilities and are looking to expand offerings of their technology down the line — including perhaps to their base community of Gloucester.
"We have had some conversations with National Grid, and we're looking to branch out to a number of different utilities and communities," Gustin told the Times. National Grid is the electric and natural gas service provider for Gloucester.
"We think this has a lot of potential," Gustin said.
Participants for the project receive detailed real-time information on how much electricity is being used and how much it costs. By using a task selection tool, the homeowner can select from some 150 actions and see how much each action will contribute to their energy savings.
In addition, customers will participate in a web-enabled communications network to share energy savings experiences and to help achieve individual and collective energy savings goals.
"I applaud these municipal light companies for providing customers with smart meter technology and other services that will help them understand the amount of energy they use, how they are using it, and ways to reduce their consumption — and electric bills — through energy efficiency," said Philip Giudice, commissioner of the state's Department of Energy Resources. "Pilot projects such as this are helping the Commonwealth emerge as a national leader in energy innovation and efficiency."
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