... a beginner at something

Smart Home - HEMS and haws

Or: the not-so smart part of the smart grid.

Thankful for the Yokohama Green Power project, part of Yokohama Smart City Project, we enjoy use of a 2011 version Home Energy Measurement System (HEMS). The diagram shows the energy management components surrounding the home gateway, the energy measurement unit is a separate unit near the utility breaker box. The HEMS  was an option of the solar system we installed and is ours to use at 40% of its device cost subsidized, in return for sharing data over the course of 4 years with its supplier, Toshiba, and ultimately with the City of Yokohama. We have completed our solar year 3 with another fine harvest. According to the feed-in payments we get from TEPCO, the solar system performs 10% better than the forecast by the installer, Nitten Solar. (The HEMS reports even 10% on top of that, but that I discard as measurement uncertainty).

Do the stakeholders get their money's worth?

Third year solar, 4400kWh, great harvest

Reading: 13455kWh

Innovation Insights

One of my paid hobbies has been innovation for the company, as in making new technology work for us to help us complete our jobs for clients, easier, faster, or more reliable. More than a year ago, one of my responsibilities shifted from process innovation to business development. Loving it.

In my free time, I took basic courses in project management, both waterfall and agile, read business books like Tribal Leadership and The Culture Game, all good and valuable, but none of these prompted me to post.

The framework for directed innovation does. It is old enough to be proven in business and criticized in public, yet new enough (to me, anyway) to get excited about innovation insights. (You too, maybe?)

Let's begin with quoting from one of many insightful articles from the company Strategyn, whose logo I borrowed for the image, The New Language of Innovation.