One of the presentations I’m really looking forward to at OpenTech 2008 in London is by AMEE, self-described as “The world’s energy meter”:

If all the energy data in the world were accessible, what would you build? The Climate Change agenda has created an imperative to measure the energy profile of everything. As trillions of pounds flow into re-inventing how we consume, we have a unique opportunity use open data and systems as a starting point. AMEE is an open platform for energy and CO2 data, algorithms and transactions.

From this PDF on the AMEE website:

AMEE is a neutral aggregation platform to measure and track all the energy data in the world. It combines monitoring, profiling and transactional systems to enable this, as well as an algorithmic engine that applies conversion factors from energy into CO2 emissions.
…
# AMEE is a technology platform (a web-service API) , designed to be built upon by you
# AMEE can represent both copyright and open data without conflict
# AMEE is open source
# You can build commercial applications using AMEE

This does sound extremely useful – the ability to convert energy into CO2 emission equivalent “enables the calculation of the “Carbon-Footprint” of anything” – and I’m going to see how I might be able to make use of AMEE’s functionality or the data set as part of the research. (As an aside, it’s interesting how often ‘energy methods’ allow us to compare diverse activities and effects with a common currency: I remember being struck by this concept before when being introduced to von Mises’ criterion in stress analysis and streamlined lifecycle analysis within a few days of each other.)

AMEE’s Gavin Starks also presented at O’Reilly’s ETech earlier this year (one day I’m sure I’ll go to this…) and the slides are available [PDF, 8MB]. On a similar theme, the very impressive Saul Griffith (of MIT Media Lab, Squid Labs, Instructables, Make et al) talked on ‘energy literacy’ – again, a detailed presentation [PDF, 7.6MB] with thoughtful notes (see also Wattzon) – and it seems that there is a certain degree of overlap, or symbiosis between the ideas. We need a public literate in energy to care enough about measuring and changing their behaviour; we equally need good and understandable energy-using behaviour data to enable that public to become literate in the consequences of their actions, and indeed for ‘us’ (designers/engineers/technologists/policymakers…) to understand what behaviours we want to address.

I’d like to think that Design for Sustainable Behaviour can help here. That’s certainly the aim of what I’m doing.