Today we announced the Hohm Score and the ability to easily check your energy consumption and compare it to others around the nation. Besides personal use of the Hohm Score, there are some great data sets that can be visualized. Below is a heat map of the United States and the average Hohm Score per state.
In Thomas Friedman’s book “Hot, Flat, and Crowded,” it mentioned a quote that has become commonplace as an example of energy concerns in the future. This quote is in reference to world population growth, currently at 6.7 billion but projected to top 9 billion people by 2050. Just facing our next billion folks, what if each person was given a single sixty-watt incandescent light bulb?
“Each bulb doesn’t weigh much—roughly 0.7 ounces with the packaging—but a billion of them together weigh around 20,000 metric tons, or about the same as 15,000 Priuses. Now let’s turn them on. If they’re all on at the same time, it’d be 60,000 megawatts. Luckily, [they] will only use their bulbs four hours per day, so we’re down to 10,000 megawatts at any moment. Yikes! Looks like we’ll still need twenty or so new 500-megawatt coal-burning power plants” – just so the next billion people can turn a light on!
Now we can visualize this through the Hohm Score and if the homes across the nation improve their scores, we can show the world how we’re improving. Now it’s easy to show how applying even the smallest low or no-cost tips can dramatically affect our nation if everyone participates. Simply put, if all 60m homes in our database improved ten points in their Hohm score, we could collectively save $16 billion in energy costs annually, or about $250 a year per home. Given that the average Hohm Score in the U.S. is a 61, or close to failing, we’re hoping we can move the country closer to a C average. To see who’s trailing in the home energy efficiency race, here are the bottom 10 states in the U.S.
There’s so much more data that can be pulled, and if you have any suggestions on what you would like to see next, reach out on Facebook and Twitter. I’m always available on these network and on this blog as well.
Elliott Lemenager – Online Community Manager