News
Lucid Design Group announces low-cost, real-time energy monitoring and display system for commercial buildings
February 19, 2009
Oakland, CA - Lucid Design Group, Inc., an award-winning provider of real-time energy monitoring and display systems for commercial buildings, today announced Building Dashboard® Starter, a new product that makes it easier and less expensive for companies, universities and other organizations to reduce costs and environmental impact through the education and active involvement of building occupants.
Building Dashboard® Starter provides a simple, easy-to-understand web-based display that offers real-time feedback on resource use. The information is updated every 60 seconds and can be viewed over the web. Comparisons can be made by the hour, day or any other time period. Usage can be expressed in energy units, cost, carbon emissions or other measurements.
Studies and Lucid's customer experiences have shown that, when people have up-to-the-minute information on how much energy is being used in buildings they occupy, they can be motivated to find ways to reduce that use.
"When people get specific, timely information about energy use, they can alter their behavior to lower consumption," said Michael Murray, CEO and co-founder of the five-year-old company. "Today there are dozens of universities, companies and other institutions across the country reducing their carbon footprint significantly because they have access to real-time information through Lucid Design Group solutions."
Building Dashboard® Starter is based on Lucid's Building Dashboard® product and was created following extensive experience with customers. It has been standardized to provide a low-cost, entry-level solution that can be installed relatively easily and will work with nearly all existing electrical and metering systems. It consists of electricity monitoring for two buildings, a competition module and educational features like Green Tips, an information resource provided by Lucid and updated regularly with real customer stories. The product is available now.
Customers can easily add more buildings and monitor additional resources, like heating, gas, water or solar. They can also purchase more modules, like Lucid's Data Downloader product, which makes it easy for customers to obtain and analyze their data, or the Green Features module, which allows customers to highlight and promote environmental enhancements they have made to their buildings.
Lucid has monitoring and display systems installed in more than a hundred buildings used by tens of thousands of people across the U.S., including the residence halls and academic facilities at many major universities. Through energy-use awareness and student competitions, those institutions have been able to reduce costs and environmental impact.
Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, Calif., uses Lucid's current Building Dashboard® product to provide employees with energy use information on a touch screen located in the company cafeteria.
The early concept for Lucid was born at Oberlin College, where students were experimenting with real-time resource monitoring to understand its ability to change behavior.
"The results were impressive," said Dr. John Petersen, co-founder and board chairman of Lucid and chair of the Environmental Studies Program at Oberlin. "People want to understand their own performance relative to others and they're interested in being part of a community that works together to conserve resources. That drives real change."
Lucid found that energy-saving competitions between campus dorms led to immediate reductions of 5 to 20 percent as well as a lower level of use in the long-term. The company's ability to set up and run competitions on college campuses over the past five years has made it a leader in the emerging field of real-time feedback in social contexts and its effect on behavior change.
About Lucid Design Group
Lucid Design Group is a privately held cleantech software company, founded in 2004, and a pioneer in providing real-time information feedback to teach, inspire change and save resources. Over the past five years, our team has endeavored to make resource use visible, accessible and engaging so that building occupants have the tools to reduce and manage their consumption.
Today, tens of thousands of people live and work in schools, companies, community and commercial centers and homes enhanced by Lucid's web-based Building Dashboard® technology. Now in its third generation, the intuitive Building Dashboard® user interface allows you to connect personal electricity, water and natural gas consumption with the actions and events that take place within buildings.
