Change just a meter away
Smartphone app MeterHero uses a simple method to solve a worldwide problem
“It’s easy to see that it’s a nice day outside and not notice other things…”
“Such as that vending machine that’s been on the entire time.”
After nearly 40 minutes of conversation, the hum of the vending machine is suddenly very audible. It pumps cold air, day and night, to cool an inventory of bottles, many of which sit for days before being consumed.
More importantly though, it’s using electricity.
Lots of electricity.
Most people don’t see the vending machine that way. In fact, most people don’t notice the vending machine at all. However, energy and water consumption is something Dr. McGee Young, associate professor of political science, has noticed his entire life.
From delivering his mother’s environmental newsletter as a kid to starting environmental clubs in high school and college to writing his dissertation, and later a book, on environmentalism, Young’s journey has been driven by finding ways to make a difference in the environment.
“It’s been how I imagine myself in the world from a very early age,” McGee said. “It’s something that gets me up early in the morning and keeps me going day after day.”
Today, Young teaches about environmental policy and conservation, along with running the start-up MeterHero, an online dashboard and smartphone app that empowers people to track and share data about their water, gas and electricity consumption
Part of that empowerment process is informing the community about their consumption rates. MeterHero makes information easy to access. Users enter information from their meters into the app to track their usage.
“Being able to put the data into the hands of the people who could be saving is a huge opportunity for water and energy efficiency,” Young remarked.
The savings are the result of users seeing their usage in real time. Utility bills arriving once a month, or every three months, make it difficult to see results from taking a shorter shower, for example.
However, by simply inserting meter numbers into MeterHero’s dashboard, energy and water consumption can be tracked down to the hour.
MeterHero is an initiative that is all encompassing. Its services are offered to businesses, individuals and even classrooms, where it is used as a teaching tool. It has been a journey for Young, something he notes was not easy.
“The last three years have been more difficult than any three years — including getting a Ph.D. and writing a book — all that pales in comparison to trying to start a company.”
Starting a company — a hefty proposal that sprouted from a Marquette classroom and an idea to make a global difference.
“We’re going to face no bigger problems in our lifetime than water scarcity and climate change.”
In the spring of 2011, Young was teaching an environmental politics and policy course. One of the focuses of the course was on water policy, which includes how water is collected, used and disposed.
During the semester, Jeff Snell gave a presentation to the class on social innovation and entrepreneurship. His talk got the class thinking of ways to combine their academic interests with this type of approach.
Their idea was to incentivize water conservation in homes and businesses. Participants would be given a score based on their use of green initiatives, such as restaurants not automatically serving water to customers.
The project grew to become H2Oscore, a web-based dashboard where users could track real-time water usage data and compare it with their neighbors. By comparing a person’s usage to their neighbor’s, the program created a competitive incentive to use less water.
Needing to develop software for the project, Young continued working after the semester, collaborating with developers to get the initiative functioning and online.
The city of Whitewater saw the project and requested a custom version for its residents. Though only 10 percent of the city signed up, water usage for those customers dropped by nearly 25 percent. The innovative program soon caught the attention of other cities.
“We became the first third-party software anywhere to provide real-time data around water usage to an entire community,” Young noted.
Receiving a grant through the Milwaukee Water Council, Young was then able to expand the software to provide it for the cities of Milwaukee, Waukesha, Grafton and Menomonie.
Thousands of people were using the software. Businesses joined as well, providing in-store credit for people who were lowering the amount of water they were using. This increased the incentive for users and provided businesses with free advertising.
The impact of H2Oscore was growing, but the very customers of the product, municipal water utilities, were holding it back.
Utilities were slow to implement the program and they were not willing to pay enough to cover the costs of designing and updating the software.
Young noted “the economics didn’t make sense.” The water agencies, which purchased the software for city residents, would lose revenue by helping their customers use less water.
In March, 2014, H2Oscore shut down, but Young did not give up. Rather, he searched for a different method of bringing the service directly to people.
His next start-up, MeterHero, took form when Young realized he was asking the wrong question.
Rather than trying to work through a utility company, he wondered “What if instead of trying to build a better utility bill, we made utility bills obsolete?”
This meant not relying on utility companies to inform consumers about how efficiently they were using resources, but finding a way to let consumers track their own usage.
The answer: the meter.
“The data is already there. It comes right off your meter,” Young said.
Over the course of a weekend at a start-up convention, Young and his team designed the prototype of MeterHero. To gain momentum for their idea, they asked Twitter users to photograph their meters using #tweetyourmeter.
The prototype was a finalist in the Clean Energy Challenge and the version for public beta was released in early July.
MeterHero’s dashboard is more comprehensive than H2Oscore, allowing users to plug in information about their consumption of water, electricity and natural gas.
The dashboard can be accessed via computer or smartphone, lending itself to real-time data tracking. As noted, utility bills arriving monthly or quarterly make it difficult to track usage changes. MeterHero, on the other hand, provides an instant response.
“That immediate feedback shows you what specific uses are contributing to your overall consumption,” Young said. “You have a much better sense of where to prioritize your efficiency.”
Also, the ways in which bills present data to customers can be confusing. Measurements such as kilowatt-hours of electricity or cubic feet of water mean little to the average consumer.
However, when a person can compare their usage to the past hour, day or week, they are more likely to identify excessive tendencies that could be curbed. Along with the tracking system, MeterHero offers suggestions to save resources.
It’s all part of the comprehensive approach to not only pinpoint areas for improvement, but modify usage behaviors as well.
“If we’d like to get better, we have to have the information and the tools to get us to that level,” Young said.
After taking a year off from teaching, Young is returning to the Marquette classroom in the fall. Teaching one course, he will promote social entrepreneurship on campus, along with continuing to build connections between Marquette and Milwaukee environmental organizations.
MeterHero will also head to the classroom in the fall. Fifty schools from around the country are currently signed up to use MeterHero as a teaching tool for middle school students.
Teachers can add their classlists to the dashboard and students will track their home meters. At school, these students will study the data they collect to meet STEM requirements of applied learning.
MeterHero in the classroom also has long-term implications for students. As they track their meter readings, they will learn habits to save energy and water. Students may also create new ways to save, something Young feels is important to the partnership.
“I don’t have all the answers, but I can provide a platform that allows you to figure out what works best in your building, your home or your school.”
Teachers will also have the opportunity to connect with other teachers via a separate program called STEM hero. Here, instructors can share ideas for conservation and teaching methods.
Teaching MeterHero is part of a movement to take the learning beyond the textbook. Young mentioned that it is easy to develop a sense of complacency in classrooms — complacency in doing the same things and having the same expectations.
He said that his year off from teaching opened his eyes to this fact.
“There’s a world of challenges and a world of opportunities,” Young said. “If we want to be relevant to that world, we have to have a sense of urgency and purpose.”
In the fall, Young joked that he may become a tougher teacher. However, alongside that new toughness, Young returns with a wealth of experience he plans to share with students interested in social innovation.
“I hope to bring a lot of new perspectives to the classroom.”
Those new perspectives will help facilitate Young’s work with social entrepreneurship. He sees Marquette’s commitment to keeping its community engaged with the world as the perfect conditions for innovative ideas.
Advocating for and empowering those willing to take risks will be crucial. Taking innovative risks is something Young urges Marquette professors to do just as much as students.
“If we’re going to lead by example as faculty and we want our students to get out there, we can’t be satisfied with tenure, sitting in our offices and not taking risks,” he said.
Young is inspired by the idea of a hands-on approach to community problems; not only to help those around him and the world, but to set precedent for the entrepreneurs who may continue the work he started.
“I wanted to chart my own course,” Young said. “If I could do this and be successful, I could blaze a trail for others to follow.”
Certainly with MeterHero’s success, the trail Young has blazed is one that aspiring difference makers can follow.
Research and reporting by Wyatt Massey, a junior studying writing-intensive English and advertising. Connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
