UK Government’s Energy Usage to be Seen in Real Time

Apparently David Cameron is so committed to cutting energy usage that people will be able to watch the government in real time to see if its keeping up its end of the deal. The Prime Minister is trying to get the government to cut down on its carbon emissions by 10 percent.

This was one of the most talked about moments in the 1010 climate campaign. Apparently people want to see carbon emissions cut by 10 percent in 2010. Within days of coming to office, David Cameron committed the entire central government estate to a 10 percent reduction in emissions within a year.

Now, as part of the pledge, Cameron said that all departments would be installing live energy meters. This would enable, not only staff, but the public as well to keep track easily of all the progress. There will be no secrets to hide here.

These meters are now in place, and the government’s data website has started publishing league table of the various departments’ progress. This allows everyone to see which departments are doing the best and which ones are doing the worst in their big quest to cut down on their energy usage. The league table draws on data from GovSpark, which is a website that aggregates the various department energy feeds and ranks them according to the month-to-month increase and decrease.

Of course, there were bound to be a few problems here. For now the website does not give meaningful data at the beginning of the month. The main problem appears to be the fact that the system does not adjust for the ratio of weekdays and weekend days at the beginning of the month.