Facebook Goes Green With ‘Social Energy App’

Screengrab of Facebook's new social energy app, announced October 17, 2011, in conjunction with the NRDC and Opower.
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Facebook may or may not be the greatest threat to our values of privacy, but the company is unabashedly trying to be a force for good when it comes to energy efficiency. At least, that’s how it is promoting its new “social energy application,” a web-based smart energy measurement tool it is developing with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Opower, a four-year-old energy efficiency software company.

Opower announced the partnership in a press release Monday: “Leveraging the Facebook platform, the app will enable consumers who choose to participate to benchmark their home’s energy usage against a national average of similar homes, compare their energy use with friends, enter energy-saving competitions, and share tips on how to become more energy efficient.”

It’s unclear yet exactly what the specifics of the new tool will entail, but if based on the current OPower platform, it wouldn’t necessitate the installation of any new equipment such as smart meters. OPower’s signature innovation is its ” statistical regression analysis of energy usage information and overlying weather patterns to hit close estimates of energy used for heating – or cooling – versus other needs,” as Greentech Media reported in 2009.

The app will live at Facebook’s Green page and Opower’s new Social page, but it won’t be available until next year, at which point it’ll be offered through just three utilities providers: Commonwealth Edison (ComEd) in the Chicago area, the City of Palo Alto (Calif.), and Glendale Water & Power (GWP) in Glendale, CA., according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“The participation from these utilities alone will make it easy for the 4 million customers from those utilities, including all residents of Chicago, to start using the new application as soon as it is launched in early 2012,” The NRDC notes in its release. “Several other utilities are expected to announce their support of this effort in the coming weeks.”

Eventually, of course, the app is expected to roll out nationwide. Interested users can sign up now for email alerts at social.opower.com.

The NRDC also provides some interesting insight onto its role and the theory behind the new app:

Dating back to NRDC’s Hood River Conservation Project in the 1980s–word-of-mouth has proved to be an effective tool in encouraging people to use energy more efficiently. With Facebook’s emergence as a global platform for word-of-mouth information transmission, the application’s combination of energy information, behavioral science, and advocacy with hundreds of millions of users has the potential to create a global dialogue about energy efficiency.

That said, the blogosphere has so far made the quick and inevitable comparison between this new effort and prior web-based smart energy reading web tools launched with much fanfare by Google and Microsoft, both of which failed utterly and closed down recently.

Google shut down it’s PowerMeter service on September 16 after two years, saying “our efforts have not scaled as quickly as we would like, so we are retiring the service.” Microsoft is turning off its two-year-old Hohm energy monitoring service on May 31, 2012. In announcing the decision, the company sounded uncannily similar to Google: “…due to the slow overall market adoption of the service, we are instead focusing our efforts on products and solutions more capable of supporting long-standing growth within this evolving market.”

However, the thinking behind the new Facebook social energy app is that because so many people spend so much of their online time on Facebook anyway, an energy app has a better chance taking off there rather than on a separate website, as was the case in the Google and Microsoft projects.

And for what it’s worth, this is hardly Facebook’s first “green” venture: The company proudly published the specs of a rack of energy efficient servers at OpenCompute.org in April, with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg noting that his company had bested Google’s power usage-ratio of 1.1 by three percent.

Zuckerberg in May also announced he was embarking upon a year-long challenge to only eat meat from animals that he himself had killed, citing the need for people to be more mindful and responsible about the effects of their consumption choices.

All that aside, we’ve reached out to Facebook, Opower and the NRDC for more on this app and we’ll update when we receive a response.

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