If you haven't had the chance to read the story of Microsoft Hohm grab a drink, sit back and read on while Troy paints a picture of the creation to implementation of Hohm.
I started working on Niagara two years ago, following a honeymoon sabbatical to inspiring places such as Mt. Everest. That extended time away from work made me reflect deeply on what I wanted to do next in my career. Like many of us here at Microsoft, I consistently love building software that can make a significant positive difference. So, when I was offered the chance to lead up a new team focused on using the power of software to help consumers throughout the world save energy and help the environment, I jumped at the chance. It was a no-brainer for me.
At Microsoft, we tend to select names of cities or areas for our codenames that often have some underlying meaning or relevance. Niagara Falls was where the famous scientist Tesla performed much of his research and development on Alternating Current (AC), the standard form of electricity that made electrification practical for billions of people. So, that is how we came up with the code name. Our product name Hohm was selected as it is short, unique, and it describes our home energy management focus. The strange spelling is admittedly a geeky twist of including the electrical unit of resistance Ohm in our name. I suppose I should fess up and admit it’s also a demonstration to my electrical engineering professors back at North Dakota State University that I haven’t forgotten everything they taught me.
Over the last two years, others have joined me in our vision to provide easy to use home energy management software that can help reduce consumption. Today, we’re launching our very first Beta of Hohm. Hohm is available to anyone in the US (and eventually throughout the world). You can use Hohm regardless of whether your utility is partnered with Microsoft. You can also use Hohm regardless of whether you have a smart meter. In cases where the homeowner does have a smart meter, and the utility is supporting Hohm, we will display even more useful information and analytics. All you need to get started is a relatively modern browser with Internet access.
Hohm is already partnered with 4 innovative US-based utilities – Xcel Energy, Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Seattle City Light, and Puget Sound Energy. These utilities will make datafeeds available very soon for any of their residential customers who sign up for Hohm, so that they can automatically receive their energy consumption, pricing, and carbon information. We’re thrilled to be working together with them to create the best user experiences possible for our mutual customers. We have many more utilities getting ready to add support for Hohm too.
Today, Hohm allows you to answer three basic questions. First, it will let you know where your energy is being used across the different areas of your home. Second, it will let you compare your own energy usage with averages in your area. Third, it will provide bottom line actionable information on ways to reduce your energy usage so that you can save money or reduce your carbon footprint.
In order to answer these seemingly simple questions, the Hohm Beta uses the highly complex Department of Energy (DOE) 2 Building model, the defacto standard for building energy efficiency professionals. We also use analytics licensed from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, where some of the best researchers in the world innovate on energy efficiency. Using these models and analytics, we process up to two hundred user input variables, along with historical hourly weather data, aggregated averages derived over decades, and individual historical usage and pricing information to ultimately model energy consumption for a home.
All of this complex processing takes considerable computing resources. That is why we built Hohm on top of Azure, the new cloud operating system from Microsoft. With Azure, we can easily dispatch distributed high performance computing resources on demand as users visit our application.
Even with that level of complexity and computing resources, we know that we won’t be 100% accurate. And, in some cases, we might be quite a ways off, especially during Beta. Our goal for the Beta is improve the application and build up a database of information so that the system can learn and become even more accurate. While individual user data will of course remain private, we will carefully derive averages from the user base to help increase the accuracy of the application. Given the wide variability of different households and human behavior, we will never be 100% accurate all the time in our savings estimates and recommendations. However, over time, as the application learns and improves, the calculations and recommendations will improve accordingly too.
We’ve worked out many of the bugs in the site in preparation for Beta. My favorite bug involved a recommendation that claimed a homeowner could save a whopping $17 million dollars each year by simply switching to natural gas. It turns out that calculation was just a bit outside of reality. While we’ve fixed thousands of bugs during our development process, given the complexity, we undoubtedly have a few more lingering in the code base. Please let us know if you see something awry.
Hohm is a journey. This Beta is our first steps on a long road towards helping everyone easily manage their energy consumption. You can expect our features and capabilities to grow a lot in the future. For instance, we’re working closely with a wide variety of appliance, thermostat, and electric vehicle manufacturers so that these energy consuming devices can be easily and automatically managed by the homeowner. We’ll share more on that soon.
Whether you are a “greenie” environmentalist in Miami trying to reduce your air conditioning consumption to help the environment, or a “greenback” in Fargo trying to stay warm with less cash, Hohm can help. Join the resistance to growing energy bills and carbon emissions. Kick the tires on the Hohm Beta and let us know what you think. We’re eager to hear from you, and make it better.
-Troy