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Modeling a Green Energy Challenge after a Blue Button

On Monday, President Obama declared this week National Health IT Week. To kick it off, HHS Secretary Sebelius co-hosted a Consumer Health IT Summit where the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announced the creation of bluebuttondata.org.  This new website advances the movement of enabling consumers to download their personal health data and share it with health providers, care givers, and others they trust—all by the click of a button.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs originally launched Blue Button with industry and non-profit collaboration.  It’s a simple, common-sense idea—people should be able to access and download their own health information—with the potential for a big impact.

As President Obama said in August 2010, “For the first time ever, veterans will be able to go to the VA website, click a simple blue button, and download or print your personal health records so you have them and can share with your doctor outside of the VA.”

Why can’t the same common-sense concept be applied to the energy industry with a “Green Button”?  Consumers should have access to their energy usage information.  It should be easily downloadable and in an easy-to-read format offered by their utility or retail energy service provider.

So today at GridWeek, I challenged the smart grid ecosystem to deliver on the vision of Green Button and provide customers access to their energy usage information electronically.  With this information at their fingertips, consumers would be enabled to make more informed decisions about their energy use and, when coupled with opportunities to take action, empowered to actively manage their energy use.

Furthermore, making this information available—in simple standard formats—will help spur innovative new consumer applications and devices from entrepreneurs, big companies, and even students.  Imagine being able to check your air conditioner from your smartphone or having a clothes dryer that saves money for you automatically during critically hot days or simply getting some helpful customized hints on how best to save energy and money in your house or apartment.

This concept of encouraging customer access to electronic energy usage information is part of the Administration’s Policy Framework for a 21st Century Grid. This framework, launched at a White House event in June 2011, highlights the value of empowering consumers with enhanced information to save energy, ensure privacy, and shrink bills.

The vision of consumer access to energy data is shared by the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), which recently passed a resolution endorsing smart grid principles that include the importance of providing consumers with affordable and timely access to their own energy use data.

And if modeled after a successful program like Blue Button, Green Button has the potential to deliver untold benefits to consumers and utilities alike.

Since its release, Blue Button has been adopted by Medicare, the Department of Defense, and private sector health care organizations.  Software developer challenges have spurred applications that expand on the Blue Button’s promise by helping consumers use their data to stay healthy and manage their care.

Through a collaborative effort, we can build an open-reference implementation of a Green Button, based on national standards for the smart grid.  If the health industry can work together through Blue Button to make this world a better place, then the energy industry can do so through Green Button. 

Let’s get to work.

Aneesh Chopra is US Chief Technology Officer

The Truth about Clean Energy Jobs

Ed note: This has been cross posted from energy.gov

The Washington Post’s assertions today about the Department of Energy’s loan programs today are both incomplete and inaccurate.

Here are the facts:  over the past two years, the Department of Energy’s Loan Program has supported a robust, diverse portfolio of more than 40 projects that are investing in pioneering companies as we work to regain American leadership in the global race for clean energy jobs.  These projects include major advances for our renewable power industry including the world’s largest wind farm, several of the world’s largest solar generation facilities, and one of the country’s first commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plants.  Collectively, the projects plan to employ more than 60,000 Americans, create tens of thousands more indirect jobs, provide clean electricity to power three million homes, and save more than 300 million gallons of gasoline a year, all while investing in American competitiveness. What matters to the men and women who have those jobs is that the investments that this Administration is making are helping to keep factories open and running. 

When the Washington Post claims that the program has created 3,500 jobs, here is what the reporters are excluding:

• 33,000 American auto jobs saved at Ford: The Post article does acknowledge that the program enabled Ford to modernize its factories to produce more fuel efficient vehicles, which a Ford spokeswoman credits for “helping retain the 33,000 jobs by ensuring our employees can build the fuel-efficient cars people want to drive.”
• More than 7,300 construction jobs: Many of the projects funded by the program are wind and solar power plants, which create significant numbers of construction jobs but once built can be operated inexpensively without a large workforce.  But the Washington Post chose to ignore all of those jobs.  If a community built a new highway or a bridge that employed 200 workers directly during construction – and many more in the supply chain -- and that also strengthened the local economy by making it faster to transport goods, would anyone say that the project created zero jobs? 
• Supply chain jobs: While these jobs aren’t reflected in official government estimates because of the difficulty in obtaining a precisely accurate count, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.  When a company spends $100 million or $200 million building a wind farm or a solar power plant, most of that economic value actually goes into the supply chain – creating huge manufacturing opportunities for the United States. 

In fact, when you look at the Washington Post’s graphic, you can see that the program has already created or saved roughly 44,000 jobs.  Many of the projects it has funded are just getting going, and many of the loans won’t even go out the door until the next few weeks.  Others have not ramped fully up to scale.  But we are on pace to achieve more than 60,000 direct jobs – and many more in the supply chain.

Here’s a simple example:

Last year, the Department awarded a loan guarantee to build the Kahuku wind farm in Hawaii.  It employed 200 workers during construction.  Those wind turbines were built in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  The project also features a state of the art energy storage system supplied by a company in Texas.  The supply chain reached 104 U.S. businesses in 21 states.  But by the Washington Post’s count, none of those jobs – not even the 200 direct construction jobs – should count.  

What’s critically important and completely ignored by the Washington Post, is that the value of this program can’t be measured in operating jobs alone.  The investments are helping to build a new clean energy industry here in America.  We are now on pace to double renewable energy generation from wind and solar from the time the President took office.  Yet we are still in danger of falling behind China and other nations that are competing aggressively for leadership in these technologies.  This is a race we can and will win, but only if we make these investments today. These investments will pay dividends not just in today’s jobs but in entire industries and supply chains – and in cleaner air and water for our children and grandchildren. 

One of the goals of the program is to create projects that will encourage the private sector to take the financing risk on other, similar projects on its own.  If we can show, for example, that a commercial scale cellulosic biofuel plant in Iowa can succeed, the private sector will likely finance many more of them around the country.

America’s economic strength has been built on technological leadership.  The next great technological revolution is the clean energy revolution, and this Administration is committed to making sure that America will continue to lead the world.