IT SOUNDS strange, but leaving your cellphone plugged in when you’re not using it could help cut your carbon footprint. Even better, it could reduce your electricity bill. We just need to start using smart-software agents – programs that act on our behalf – to manage how we store our electricity and charge our devices.
In many countries electricity is charged on a two-tier pricing system – peak or off-peak – even though the real cost of generating electricity varies much more widely, depending upon how much a customer base consumes.
This is because in order to meet sudden surges in demand, caused whenever we all simultaneously reach for the kettle during a commercial break, say, additional generators that have been running at half speed have to be cranked up to provide extra power. It’s an inefficient and costly system, says Alex Rogers at Southampton University’s School of Electronics and …