What’s your idea?

With Carbage, we want to turn any building with wifi and a smart meter into part of a giant, distributed personal carbon calculator, to show people in realtime how choices about where they’re working and living, and how much energy they’re using at a given time affect their their carbon footprint.

When we make the feedback loop on something like carbon footprint much tighter, like going from a timescale of months, to hours and minutes, we radically change how we relate to energy. We can stop having to rely on half-remembered facts about unplugging phone chargers, and immediately see the effects of the changes in our lifestyles based on measurable facts and figures.

We’re doing this by using open source software and hardware to either build very cheap smart devices, or by adapting existing devices like wifi routers to talk to smart meters, to give people easy access to this data.

What is the social need or challenge your idea could address?

Most of us by now are dimly aware of our carbon footprints, and some of us have even tried out a web based carbon calculator too.

However, these are nearly always time consuming and quite involved processes, forcing you to think about how what your last few utility bills have been, how far you normally travel, and so on.

As a result, there is a very limited audience for them, and they aren’t particularly useful for helping change your behaviour.

In contrast to telling you what changes to your behaviour affect your carbon footprint, we show you instead, as you make them. When you can see how switching light off in a building affects your personal carbon footprint within seconds of doing so, you’re more likely to do it.

What’s really new about your idea?

It is possible now to see how much energy we are using in our houses, using a CurrentCost, Onzo or smart meter. The government has also announced it will fund the roll-out of devices like these, that will put these in every house in the country over the next three years.

Using AMEE, it is trivial to turn into a figure of kilowatt hours into kilos of CO2, telling me the carbon footprint of anything I’m doing in my house in realtime.

What Carbage does, that no-one else is doing, is make it possible to work out the carbon cost not just in my home, but in any space, by looking at the power being used in a building, and looking at how may people are using that building at one time, and working out that cost, in kilos of CO2 per person at any given time.

This is disruptive and interesting, as this carbon data stream becomes something that I can mashup with other services, or use to make being part of a Carbon Rationing Action Group (CRAG) much more accessible.

Also, the focus with Carbage is on users having ownership on data they generate. This is in contrast to the default with utility companies right now, where they own any data recorded by a meter when you use electricity in your own house.

Finally, this bottom-up approach, of adding new features to existing kit is also new - wifi routers can become carbon calculators if they download some software, using existing upgrade channels provided by ISP providers, which is one model we intend to use to scale the idea.

What inspired you to come up with your idea in the first place?

We were frustrated with how static carbon calculators were online, and inspired seeing how Nintendo applied computer-game concepts, like tight feedback loops, and progress tracking in Wii Fit to get thousands of people to do thing’s they’d never normally do, like run on the spot, pretend to hulahoop in front of television.

Also, we saw how location based services like BrightKite, Plazes, and FireEagle blend the two worlds of the digital and the actual and how websites like the Carbon Account and Carbon Diet make tracking a carbon footprint feel possible.

From 1-5, what stage of development would you say your idea was in?

Two - there are a couple of buildings we’ve been able to try experiments in with cheap smart meters and off the shelf wireless routers, and we’ve run the idea by people who work in relevant sectors that agree it is all technically possible to do, and would scale well.

As part of the research informing this idea, we built the TeaLight, a little device to help you make tea and cut carbon at the same time, by smoothing out the peaks in demand on the national grid that require power companies to spin up dirty coal fired power stations would to meet.

What can we do for you?

The technical side is fairly well defined now, and over the last few months we’ve had asked enough experts to feel that this isn’t the main hurdle to pass here.

The big challenge for this idea is doing what we want to do while protecting people’s privacy.

We see the main challenge other than that for the weekend is communicating what we want to do, and why it’s important.

We need help dealing with larger organisations who will be needed to make this idea scale up.

There is already funding out there for green tech projects, but we don’t have much experience with engaging funders, hence the interest in a mentor to help frame our offering, so we can find funding to run a decent size pilot scheme.

If Social Innovation Camp is able to help push your idea forward, do you have the time or desire to take ownership of it?

Yes. We’ve been thinking about this idea, and working on this idea for on and off for about 6 months now.

If not, would you be happy for someone else to take your idea forward?

Yes, as long as they stay open enough for others to be free to compete with them if they’re not executing the idea very well themselves.

This idea was submitted by Chris Adams and James Gardner

Chris is a web designer/developer at Stemcel Studios. James is a technical consultant and web developer.