The Desktop Windmill – The UK Design Council’s Energy Saving Proposals.
by Petz Scholtus, Barcelona, Spain 
on 12.24.05
The Desktop Windmill is just one of the smart ideas that have resulted from the British Design Council’s environmental project on household energy use. The Future Currents project tells us that a third of all the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions come from residential households. Researchers spent 8 weeks studying energy consumption in a London flat and have consequently come up with various proposals for new products, services and policies that will help save energy. Many of these are about how to make energy more visible to us consumers. The idea behind this is that if we could see how much we use, like a phone bill, then we would be more aware and try to save more. The Desktop Windmill is a cool little gadget you can download. It will show you how much energy you could produce with your own wind turbine and how much toast it would make! (currently available to choose from are weather stations in the UK) To vote for your favourite Future Currents energy saving proposal got to ::Future Currents Project ::download the desktop windmill
[Leonora & Petz]
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How about smart outlets?
You could have outlets that track power usage (similar to the kill-a-watt plugin meters), with each having a unique identifier. At the end of the month, when checking your energy bill, you'd see that Bedroom-1, which you have a lamp and radio plugged into, consumed 3kwh of electricity, while Office-2, with a computer and printer, used close to 30kwh.
With this kind of breakdown, you would see where you can save the most energy, and perhaps when the time has come to replace that old water heater or freezer with a more efficient model.
This model would be more akin to that of a phone bill, showing the length of calls, and the cost according to time of day, roaming, etc.