Text Messages Fighting Climate Change

Californians Are Keeping Dirty Energy Off the Grid via Text Message; When power demand rises, OhmConnect sends out a text to customers: cut your energy use and you'll earn money. It's keeping demand spikes under control.

Erica Gies, October 30, 2017 (Inside Climate News)

“When Julie Waltz Madziarczyk's phone chirps to tell her that the electricity grid needs her to save power for an hour the next day, she sets a reminder. And at the appointed time, she walks around the house…[pulling plugs and flipping switches. It is a routine that takes about five minutes. She has found it is not] a hardship going without electricity for an hour, about once a week…[She is not a hard-core environmentalist. She earned more than $800 in the last year for responding to text messages from OhmConnect, which] passes along payments from grid operators…[OhmConnect aggregates its network of hundreds of thousands of residential subscribers] across the territories of California's three major utilities…Together these people supply a vital service to the grid: keeping it in finely tuned balance by tweaking demand for power instead of maxing out supply…It's called demand response, and it pays in more ways than one. To the utility, a burst of conservation is worth as much as a burst of power…Managed this way, the grid runs smoothly…[and reduces] greenhouse gas emissions…” click here for more

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