Personal Kyoto provides New Yorkers the means to measure, track and share their progress towards meaningful electric use reduction.

Tell me more.

By analyzing your ConEd electric usage information, we can calculate a Personal Kyoto Goal for you that represents the amount you need to reduce your electric use to to achieve something like what the Kyoto Protocol would require of you. This calculation is based on how residential electric use has grown in the US since 1990 — the year upon which the Kyoto Protocol is based. Assuming that your electric use has increased at the same rate as the average American, we can calculate a target usage goal that would effectively make you Kyoto Protocol compliant (at least for electric usage — a big component of New Yorkers' energy consumption). There are many ways to reduce your electric use, but there's not really a good way to monitor your progress and that's what Personal Kyoto provides.

What does it look like?

Here's a look at a typical user's electric use:

Once we retreive your historical electric use data, you will see a plot like this which shows 3 things. One is your monthly electric use in blue. The second is an average monthly use in either orange or green. If there is enough historical data for your account, we compute a moving 12 month average and display it as a green line. This monthly average removes the seasonal effects of your electric use patterns. While your actual monthly use might go up or down, this 12 month moving average should be pretty stable. If you have an orange line on your plot, it's because you didn't have enough energy history data to compute a 12 month moving average for that month. The orange line is still an average, but one that's made up of less than 12 months of data. Eventually the orange line will converge with the green when you have 12 months of electric history in your residence. After that, we compute your Personal Kyoto Goal and plot it in gray. Your Personal Kyoto Goal (as defined by the Kyoto Protocol and average electric use increases in the US since 1990) is calculated by taking 75% of the first 12 month moving average data point (green line) after you signed up for the site. Your objective is to reduce your monthly average use (green line) to a level that is at or below your Personal Kyoto Goal (gray line).

Where does the data come from?

When you register with Personal Kyoto, we ask for your ConEd account number. With this we can retreive your historical energy usage from the ConEd website (try it here yourself). The energy usage data is the only thing we store and we keep your account number encrypted. Eyebeam is a non-profit organization and will not sell or exploit your personal information in any way.

Who's responsible for this?

Personal Kyoto is a tool developed in the Openlab at Eyebeam (a non-profit Art & Technology center in New York City) by Ben Engebreth (bengebre@eyebeam.org). If you are a software developer interested in bringing Personal Kyoto to your town, get in touch!