Making Electricity and Solar Usage Visible To The Naked Eye

By Yann Brandt

Bidgely means Electricity in Hindi. And making your electricity usage at home understandable is the business of Bidgely, the company based in Sunnyvale, California. Electricity is this magical physics phenomenon that results in a bill at the end of the month, we use it almost every minute of the day but do we really know what is going on?

The goal is to disaggregate your energy usage, which Bidgely calls ‘energy disaggregation’ through its platform filled with intelligent algorithms. By seeing the energy usage through green button or utility dashboards, the homebeat platform can tell you (the homeowner) what appliance is using the electricity. By showing you the details, it allows the user(s) of the home, to review their usage with a day lag and change their habits. Bidgely allows homeowners to use their system for free and all sharing of data is purely opt-in. The company is working throughout the Country but in some areas you may be required to install a monitoring hardware kit though the goal is to be hardware-free.

It may be complicated to see how a energy disaggregation tool has any meaning for the solar industry at first glance. Information and data will drive new users to reduce energy usage. Homeowners will want to battle each other for energy efficiency pride and being close to net-zero. It can also be foreseen, that solar companies and home energy service providers would benefit to see how much energy a home is using and how the pattern of usage affects the value of solar.

We continue to see the trend of utilities, homeowners, home automation and solar come together as we wrote a few months back (Is Google About To Be Your Cleantech Utility). Bidgely animates the story for everyone with data and algorithms. With their summer freedom campaign, utilities can use the Bidgely service free of charge for the next 2 years, so expect to see your energy bill come together on drier load at a time!