In the first installement of this series, I detailed what the Green Deal was about and how I went about arranging an assessment, which is the first step in getting anything done. I had the assessment last week so it's now time to report back on how it went. Price and Output As detailed in my previous post, it took five calls before I reached someone who really knew what I wanted and could organise an assessment. Or so I thought. The second company on my list did call me back eventually, at which point I had to tell them that because they had called me two weeks after I had sent a request, I had already booked with someone else.

EnergyDeck recently introduced degree days into their system. You may be wondering what they are and what they're for. My name is Martin Bromley, and I'm from www.degreedays.net - a popular source of degree days for locations worldwide, and the source that EnergyDeck is using. I've got to know the EnergyDeck folks as they've been integrating with our system, and I was honoured when they asked me to write about degree days as a guest post on their blog. Degree days are a specialist kind of weather data that is used to account for the effect of the weather on energy consumption.

We've been very busy with new functionality over the past few months. Some are fairly simple, some are a lot more complex and all of them give you more ways to use EnergyDeck the way you want to. The list includes:  Simplified Account Plan Organisation Support User Roles Overlays Degree Days Data Import  

I live in a mid-terrace house that was built early in the 20th Century using solid brick construction. It's one of those typical suburban houses with nice bay windows and a small gas fireplace in the lounge, the sort you find all over the UK. Like most houses of this type, it is draughty, badly insulated and very inefficient in its energy use. I am starting a project to fix that and I would like to have the primary improvement works done under the Green Deal. The Green Deal is a new initiative by the UK government that became effective at the end of January and that aims to reduce the number of buildings that require high energy spendings in order to operate. It is designed so that it can benefit landlords and tenants alike, as well as owner occupiers. The primary way in which it does this is through easy financing that is linked to the property rather than the owner or occupier: the idea is that once the works are done, the energy bills of the property will go down. So the loan that finances the project is repaid against savings on the electricity bill. If the property is sold, the remainder of the loan is sold with it and keeps being applied to the electricity bills of that property. This has a number of advantages for tenants and landlords: An initial survey of the property is done by an accredited assessor who will identify what are the most cost effective measures for that property based on its characteristics and the way the people live in it, There is no upfront cost apart from the cost of the initial assessment, As the loan is made against the property rather than a person, there are no credit checks, which makes the finance and the whole scheme much more accessible to people who typically find it difficult to obtain credit, such as people who are self-employed or have bad credit history, You can receive cashback repayments against particular measures, You can have additional works that are not covered by the Green Deal carried out at the same time, as long as you finance them separately.

As the year is drawing to a close, we're thinking back of all the events and experiences 2012 has held for us, much like many people around the world tend to do at this time of year. For EnergyDeck in particular, 2012 has been a special year - it being our first full year of operation. We started work on our first prototype in October 2011, and by December of that year we set off on the production version of EnergyDeck. It took a while to get things working the way we wanted, and we launched the first public version of EnergyDeck in March 2012 with the mission to take energy efficiency to a mass market. Since then, we have been working relentlessly on improving the platform in order to extend its capabilities and incorporate feedback from our users.

EnergyDeck has joined Utilidex's utilidex50 offering. Utilidex aims to deliver EnergyDeck integrated with their inMotion solution both in the UK as well as the Australian and New Zealand markets. inMotion significantly reduces the integration challenge for energy retailers and allows them to deploy value added services to their customers within a short time frame. “Our vision for the utilidex50 is to attract innovative offerings that can easily plug into the utilidex platform,” commented Richard Brys, CEO, “We want to attract high calibre companies into the space, allowing them to deliver their innovations and ideas to the wider energy community and in particular to utilities who wish to adapt their business models and offerings. EnergyDeck is a great fit for this initiative. Led by a high calibre management team, EnergyDeck has a vision to truly re-shape the way customers interact with their energy consumption to significantly reduce costs and their carbon footprint. We support EnergyDeck wholeheartedly in this endeavour and want our utility customers and their end customers to benefit from the offering.”  

We've been keeping busy over the summer (if that's what you want to call it) and added a host of new features and upgrades to the EnergyDeck platform which we're excited to share today! The first change you will notice is a new and improved UI, resulting in a much cleaner and more focused interface. But the changes aren't just cosmetic and we've made sure to improve accessibility as well, e.g. of the visualisation options in the navigator and charts.

We're pleased to announce that our smart importer has just become even smarter, and now also understands Green Button data. Green Button is a US based effort to make energy data more accessible and actionable for consumers. From the official website at http://www.greenbuttondata.org Green Button is an industry-led effort that responds to a White House call-to-action: provide electricity customers with easy access to their energy usage data in a consumer-friendly and computer-friendly format via a "Green Button" on electric utilities' website. Green Button is based on a common technical standard developed in collaboration with a public-private partnership supported by the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology. Voluntary adoption of a consensus standard by utilities across the Nation allows software developers and other entrepreneurs to leverage a sufficiently large market to support the creation of innovative applications that can help consumers make the most of their energy usage information.  

Launched by Forum for the Future in 2009, the West of England Carbon Challenge (WECC) today supports more than 100 businesses, public and third sector organisations in Bristol and Bath on their path to reduce carbon emissions. It challenges participants to commit to making an annual cut in emissions for four years to reach a cumulative total of at least 10% by 2012/13. Members receive advice, tools and practical support to measure, manage and reduce their CO2 emissions.WECC participants now get free access to a Community version of EnergyDeck. It allows members to track up to 5 "meters" (i.e., data input sources) and access selected advanced features. Further, by signing up to the WECC group on EnergyDeck, participants can compare themselves against aggregate peer benchmarks and view savings measures (fully anonymised) implemented by others in the group. Forum for the Future - as the WECC group administrator - can easily view, analyse and aggregate the consumption data submitted by members in a single account.

We've been working hard on our backend over the past few weeks to enable the import, processing and visualisation of high frequency data. That is, data with a reading intervals down to 1 minute. This covers the output of most smart meters available in the market today, and importantly, half hourly meters that are common place e.g. in larger UK buildings. With this feature, you can now import high frequency readings from CSV (comma separated values) files directly into your meter(s) in EnergyDeck, so no more manual data entry is required. You can use the new feature with any of the premium plans, ie starting at £29/month for the "small" plan that allows you to track up to 2 sites and 20 meters, all of which can be high frequency.

We're delighted to have been selected for Seedcamp Berlin, taking place May 14-16 at the Bertelsmann residence in Unter den Linden. The 20 startups in attendance are coming from all over Europe, and will spend two days pitching and meeting with 100+ mentors including investors, entrepreneurs and web experts. We're the only energy/sustainability focused company in this web-focused group of startups. Berlin wir kommen!

It is no secret that communities hold the key to scaling sustainability to new levels. These communities take many different shapes and can include your local neighbourhood, schools, business associations, or a group of organisations in a specific geographical area (or maybe at national level). In EnergyDeck, we call communities 'Groups', which is also the name of the new feature we just launched. With Groups, you can essentially do two things: As a group member, you can compare yourself against benchmarks from the group and see what projects others in the group have implemented (anonymised, as always) As a group administrator, you can - with the permission of group members - view detailed data of the group member sites in your own account

02 Apr 2012, James Murray, BusinessGreen http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2165126/energydeck-energy-management-masses-free-software A UK start-up is looking to drive adoption of energy and environmental management software following the launch earlier this month of a free software suite designed to help small and medium-sized firms and public-sector organisations track key environmental metrics. Founded last autumn by Google's former European head of green operations, Benjamin Kott, EnergyDeck provides users with the ability to track and manage their electricity, gas, and water use, and waste production, and also manage projects designed to reduce their environmental impact. In addition, the company will this week update the software to provide users with the ability to track transport and travel-related emissions. EnergyDeck is entering an increasingly crowded market that has seen a host of software firms launch energy and environmental management systems in recent years.

Sixteen of the UK’s most innovative and fast growing Cleantech companies have earned a place on an entrepreneurial trade mission to San Francisco, with the aim of opening up their business to the US market.

EnergyDeck, the innovative web based platform that helps organisations save resources and costs, was taken out of private beta today and launched publicly. The app can be accessed at www.energydeck.com. Users can sign up directly and start using it within minutes.