Pow-dr is a B2B service provider that helps change energy demand profiles - at scale!
Our origins: Greer, Zeynep, and Ralf began working together as academic researchers at Imperial College London and the London School of Economics and Political Science. We founded pow-dr after five years of conducting research into the technical feasibility of what has now become our product. We tested user interactions with the product’s various features with the academic rigour of behavioural economic analysis.
Our inspiration: Throughout our experience, we recognized the powerful possibility to enable our users to be rewarded for doing good, and most importantly to have true agency in the renewable energy transition and climate change mitigation.
Our mission: We are enabling a near-term future in which the growing network of our users around the world–our pow-dr planet–eliminates the need for fossil fuel generation to back up renewable generation sources when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
Our Services
Energy monitoring and analytics
We provide a simple and effective technology platform to support our clients in measuring appliance-specific energy use.
Grid load balancing
By switching off a network of localized devices, we support the matching of electricity demand with supply to avoid unexpected outages.
Syncing use with renewable supply
Our platform can facilitate reliance on renewable electricity sources like wind and solar by shifting consumption patterns, reducing the need for fossil fuel generation.
Blog Articles
Read our blog articles to follow our journey.
Set it and forget it with pow-dr
How doing less can mean doing more when it comes to your energy use
Set it and forget it with pow-dr
How doing less can mean doing more when it comes to your energy use
Ever wonder how your home electronics and appliances are always running? Or why your utility has suddenly started charging you more for your energy use during some hours and not others? Or just what those ugly black wires are doing blocking your otherwise scenic window view?
I used to wonder all that, too. Back in college (Go Lions!), when I first started learning about climate change and the tremendously unequal impacts it would have on the world’s poorest despite being caused by high-emitting countries like my own, I was extremely motivated to change my behavior to align with my values. I went vegetarian, and later vegan. I bought a bike. I became obsessive about minimizing my own food waste, and shopping at my local farmer’s market. And in doing so, I hoped to be setting an example for my peers.
Additionally, a sliver of my attention became continuously preoccupied with whether I could turn things off. Not using this room? Lights off. Not using that phone charger? Unplug. No longer watching that TV? Power down.
I was studying economics, and I guess it comes as no surprise that I was famously the one person in the class who would always contribute the maximum to the ‘public pot’ when we demoed popular economics games meant to demonstrate that humans behave ‘rationally’ by keeping all of their endowed money rather than contributing it to a public good that benefits everyone. In my mind, I was the only one behaving rationally, because if we all instead contributed our entire endowment to the public pot—as I did—we’d all end up with more money than if we each kept it. Some attributed my actions to my gender (I was one of five women in a class of 30), though my professor ultimately congratulated and consoled me all at once. Really, I had the right idea, he said, and my actions were the only way to maximize winnings for us all. But people just don’t tend to look much further than their own purses and pockets. Sigh.
Despite my purely altruistic intentions in turning things off (I was not paying my own energy bills…thanks, parents), I was not studying engineering and clearly had no clue how the ‘energy system’ actually worked. In my mind, every time I turned the lights on, a bit more coal was shoveled into the furnace of a power plant. Every time I turned the lights off, I was contributing to a real-life public good with little skin off my back. I had learned about “Pareto improvements” in my econ classes—a concept that points out the obvious desirability of taking actions and decisions where someone is made better off and no one is made worse off—so all this “costless” cognitive effort made sense to me if it meant saving some pollutants and greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere.
While I still turn things off when I can out of altruistic habit (and because I now pay my own energy bills), I’m now aware that coal isn’t shoveled into a furnace in real time when I turn the lights on. Instead, a functioning electricity grid is the result of a complex balancing act with skilled puppet masters forecasting and reacting to our real-time energy decisions constantly, securing the bulk of energy production from suppliers in advance in ‘forward markets’ and filling the gaps in real time on ‘spot markets’. To keep our lights on, these puppeteers continuously monitor and balance energy supply and demand by ensuring the right flow of electrons from power plant to end user through those ugly wires outside your window.
This dance between supply and demand also gets at that question of why your utility charges you different prices over the day. Boiled down, economics is the study of how we humans make decisions under conditions of scarcity. High energy demand relative to supply at any point in time—think, during extremely high or low temperatures when a bunch of households start turning on their heating and AC (looking at you, recent Texas and California power outages)—is going to lead to higher prices due to the scarcity of supply.
Where I live (San Diego, California), our energy prices go up from 4-9pm every day, since this is the time when the sun sets (solar energy goes offline) and lots of people get home from work, turn on their lights, cook dinner, watch TV…you get it. Demand goes up, supply goes down, and it becomes more costly for our puppeteers to perform their balancing act.
In an ideal world with perfect information and (super)human reactivity, the puppeteers would charge us a price that covers the real-time costs of energy provision, which change depending on the time of day, the weather, which power sources are producing, and how much all of us are consuming. It took me ages to get my partner to react to the 4-9pm price increase, so while utilities may move closer to real-time pricing, they can’t realistically expect people to change their behavior accordingly, nor is it really costless for us to bear that kind of cognitive burden. Plus, there may be all kinds of messy ethical implications with regard to who can and can’t change their energy use at particular times.
Here’s where automation can make all the difference. Imagine if our appliances could do all of the thinking for us, waking up when we need to use them, and quietly going to sleep—saving the puppeteers from desperately turning on that dirty coal-powered ‘peaker’ plant, and lowering our ever-increasing energy bills—when we don’t. Our usage can then sync with the energy our sun and wind provide to the grid at zero running cost, zero air pollution, and zero greenhouse gas emissions, reducing the need for fossil fuels in our energy system. And it can save us some cash and mental space, too. (For fun, we’ll throw in some prizes – why not? Life’s short.)
That’s the future we envision at pow-dr, and we hope you’ll be an enthusiastic partner in achieving it. Because – as I learned the hard way via economics games – for everyone to win, we all have to do our part.
