Danger, Will Robinson! Your Energy Costs are Rising!
An LCD screen dissolves from green to blue… a timer begins counting down as the screen starts pulsing, finally shifting colors to a crimson red. Something from the latest sci-fi epic? No, just an easy way to conserve energy. ConsumerPowerline is giving out digital units that display visual cues of peak energy usage hours, allowing participants to conserve power during that time and to get a nice kickback for it.
This is possible simply because utility companies have to ramp up their electricity production during peak times, which is expensive and inefficient. ConsumerPowerline seized this as an opportunity by notifying businesses, apartment complexes and any other participants to conserve their power, selling the reduced demand in electricity to other utilities. They did this previously by using common forms of communication like e-mail and voice mails, but with these new digital gauges they can give a visual cue to people in their program. The gauges receive updates on energy usage times from a satellite pager network.