BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The results are in from San Diego Gas & Electric’s (SDG&E) Biggest Energy Saver campaign in California, which utilized the Tendril Connect ™ cloud platform, Tendril in-home smart devices, and a social media gaming application developed by Simple Energy integrated on the Tendril platform. The winner of the Biggest Energy Saver campaign, Erica Faunce of Lakeside, Calif., achieved a 46.5 percent energy savings, equal to 1,356 kilowatt hours for her family of three. This is the first time a social media gaming application, originally designed for Facebook, has been deployed to create a persistent dialogue between utilities and consumers around energy savings.
The campaign, which ran from Sept. 1-Nov. 30, 2011, included 200 SDG&E residential customers. The participants were selected to pit their energy efficiency skills against one another, share their results daily online through the Simple Energy social gaming application and monitor their savings in real-time through in-home energy management devices developed by Tendril and provided by SDG&E. The average savings of the San Diego participants who used the social gaming app integrated with the Tendril automated control devices was 20 percent, compared with 9 percent for those who used the devices alone. The results confirm that using behavioral science, like the Simple Energy application, in combination with device control and real-time information can increase consumer engagement and energy savings.
“One of our core principles has been to remain humble about predicting the ‘killer app’ and instead focus our efforts on building an open, secure platform that can be leveraged by third parties, like Simple Energy, to unleash a wave of innovative applications,” said Kent Dickson, CTO, Tendril. “Harnessing the power of the vibrant app developer community rather than focusing on a closed platform and a narrow set of applications will win out in the end. The results from the Biggest Energy Saver campaign bear out the merits of this approach and the benefits that it provides to utilities, developers and consumers.”
The smart devices included the Tendril Transport (an IP gateway), Tendril SetPoint smart thermostats, Tendril smart outlet plugs and the Tendril Insight, an in-home display that communicates with networked smart devices, such as thermostats, electricity meters and outlets, and displays information and alerts about energy consumption, rates, and cost of use.
The Biggest Energy Saver campaign was launched in June 2011 by Grid 21 in partnership with Texas-based utilities Oncor and CenterPoint Energy, as well as SDG&E in California. Grid 21 is a non-profit organization committed to engaging electricity customers in using a new generation of tools and technologies to better manage their electricity consumption.
SDG&E, the only utility to participate in the campaign in California, was able to leverage their investment in smart meters, to deliver more benefits and savings to consumers.
“SDG&E has more than 30 years of experience in implementing successful energy efficiency programs, and with our smart meter rollout largely complete, we are now turning the corner with tools to provide meaningful energy usage data and value for our customers,” said Ted Reguly, director of customer programs and assistance at SDG&E. “The Biggest Energy Saver campaign is a great example of the creative ways that we can facilitate a higher level of engagement with customers and demonstrate how technology can leverage smart meter data, providing real benefits.”
Simple Energy uses a social gaming platform to engage consumers in saving energy on the mobile and social web. It takes customers’ real-time energy data and normalizes it so they can compete fairly in improved energy savings.
“Integrating our app with the Tendril Connect cloud platform was a no-brainer for us,” said Yoav Lurie, founder and CEO of Simple Energy. “Tendril has built a terrific platform that can give us access to major stakeholders, including utilities like SDG&E, consumers, meter makers and other players in the energy ecosystem. With one fell swoop, we are able to deploy our application using Tendril’s platform, APIs and datasets. We’re leveraging Tendril’s investment in the underlying technology and integrations to change how utilities engage their consumers.”
Simple Energy integrated its application on Tendril Connect through Tendril’s Application Developer Program, where developers can leverage the cloud platform’s leading footprint with leading utilities, and energy service providers to develop applications for millions of consumers. The program has more than 150 developers and is designed to provide utilities and consumers with increased choice selecting from a wide array of applications and smart devices. Application developers interested in building on Tendril Connect to develop applications for smart energy can find more information, including APIs and datasets at http://www.dev.tendrilinc.com.
Tendril Connect is an open, standards-based, scalable and secure platform that gives energy service providers unprecedented insight, choice and control over grid operations and the customer experience through such programs as Energy Efficiency, Direct Load Control and Demand Response. Tendril Connect provides the communications, extensibility and security necessary to support millions of networked devices, allowing energy service providers to connect with consumers across multiple smart devices and touch points. Built from the ground up to handle “big data”, it applies behavioral science expertise, integrated building models and analytics to generate the intelligence from data and connected devices needed to support the emerging marketplace of new energy products and services.
About Tendril
Tendril is the Energy Platform company, delivering end-to-end consumer engagement products, applications and services powered by Tendril Connect™—an open standards-based, secure and scalable platform that takes the complexity out of the Energy Internet. Tendril Connect creates a dialogue between energy service providers, third party providers of smart products and services, and consumers. Delivering consumer engagement software, in-home products and applications as well as easy to integrate utility solutions such as Demand Response and Energy Efficiency, Tendril offers unparalleled insight into energy decisions, making the Energy Marketplace a reality. The company is venture backed by VantagePoint Capital Partners, Siemens Venture Capital (SVC), Good Energies, RRE Ventures and GE. For more information, visit www.tendrilinc.com.