Safety in Numbers
Brighter Planet's blog
Vote for Sparkwire!
We want YOU to vote for Sparkwire, our Apps for Energy challenge entry. It allows any app to access your Green Button data without you having to download it yourself from your utility.
Green what?
Green Button is a new standard being led by the Department of Energy which allows anyone to download their energy usage data from their utility. The DOE started the Apps for Energy contest in April to help drive use of the new standard. Currently, 15 utilities serving 27 million homes have committed to providing Green Button downloads. With this data, there are many ways apps could help us save energy: think targeted conservation tips to comparisons with neighbors to verification of energy-efficiency investments to rewarding greener behavior. Many companies and individuals have already developed great new energy apps to help all of us make sense of this data, reduce our energy use, and save money.
There is a catch, though: for these energy apps to work well, they have to be able to get our Green Button data without us having to log in and download the data every month/hour/minute. Our experience in helping individuals reduce their environmental impact has taught us that removing barriers to entry is critical. So we created our own app, Sparkwire, to easily share your Green Button data with other apps. You just provide Sparkwire with your utility site login and it does the rest. Any app connected to Sparkwire can pull in your latest data without any additional log-in or download. Don’t worry, your login info is encrypted and can only be used when an app you authorize requests access. This video demonstrates everything.
Please give us your support by voting today (and every day thereafter :)) at challenge.gov.
What blog is this?
Safety in Numbers is Brighter Planet's blog about climate science, Ruby, Rails, data, transparency, and, well, us.
Who's behind this?
We're Brighter Planet, the world's leading computational sustainability platform.