A "smart" demonstration home set up by Southern California Edison. (Photo: Lauren Sommer)

California's electric utilities have installed more than 11 million smart meters in homes and businesses around the state. Which means for the first time, customers can see how much electricity they're using every hour, instead of once-a-month when the bill comes.

Consumers use less energy, studies have shown, when they can see that real-time data. But getting customers to pay attention in the first place may be the biggest hurdle.

Digital smart meters provide a stream of energy use data, which industry analysts say has the potential to remake our homes. That's evident just outside of Los Angeles, where Southern California Edison has set up a "smart" demonstration home.

"Above us we have photovoltaic solar panels to the left used for generating electricity and a solar thermal water heating system," says Cynthia Miller as she leads a tour of the "Smart Energy Experience."

"You might notice that we have some nice appliances," she says, pointing to the kitchen. The house is a green gadget-lovers dream. There's an electric car in the garage, LED lights, and a "smart" washing machine that communicates with the dryer.

"They're able to talk to each other so the washer can tell the dryer what its washing and the dryer can determine the optimal heat setting for that particular load of laundry," Miller says.

There's also a small screen in the kitchen that shows how much power the house is using at any given moment. Miller demonstrates what happens when you turn the toaster on. "And we'll see a jump here… and there we go. The jump happened and it's 1.7 kilowatts at 41 cents per hour."

The real intelligence of this house is its ability to communicate with the electric grid through its Home Area Network. So on a hot summer day, when SCE is cranking out power, the utility could send a message to your house that kicks your home into conservation mode.

"You notice my lights have dimmed, the ceiling fan turned on, the shades are coming down," says Miller. The thermostat turns up to 73 degrees and the air-conditioning shuts off. SCE would offer this as a voluntary program with financial incentives to sweeten the deal.

"You know, what we anticipate is the awareness is really going to drive a change in behavior for our customers because this information is compelling," says Miller.

Swimming in a Sea of Data

Of course, our homes today aren't quite as advanced. That's evident every time I log into my PG&E SmartMeter account.

My home energy use on PG&E's website.

My account shows charts of my home's daily and hourly energy use. But, for the average consumer like me, it doesn't tell me a lot. I see a few spikes in the chart where clearly my husband and I used more electricity, but what caused it? Neither of us could figure it out.

"For most people, including for me, that really is not very useful information," says Jim Sweeney, director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University.

Studies have shown that consumers reduce their energy use by as much as 10 percent when they have smart meter data like mine. Sweeney says they also studied that with a group of Google employees.

"The results have been very disappointing. In the first month, there was a significant reduction of energy use, but by end of three or four months, they were back to the same amount. This becomes an interesting toy or gimmick for people at first, but then they get tired of doing it and they revert right back to the old behavior patterns," Sweeney says.

No One Said Change Was Easy

Sweeney says using electricity in our homes is a lot like going grocery shopping in a store with no price tags. "There are flank steak and chuck steak and hamburger. But you've never seen a price tag ever in a grocery store. How good a shopper would you be with that little information?"

There are reasons to pay attention to energy, whether it's to reduce your carbon footprint or save money on your utility bill. But even though electricity may seem expensive, Sweeney says it's only a small part of the average household's income.

"We use 2.3 percent of our disposable personal income for electricity, natural gas and all other energy in the house. So if you have work hard to save that, you're probably not going to do it," he says.

Sweeney believes the key is to attach a price tag to the decisions we make the second we make them. So, if you turn up your air conditioning, the thermostat tells you how much more you're spending.

The technology to do that isn't far away. Today's smart meters already have the capability to talk to your house through a home area network. The California Public Utilities Commission also recently ruled that utilities must make customers' energy use data available to third-party companies that sell home energy management systems, if a customer purchases one.

But utilities have a long way to go to get customers to think this way. Only 20 percent of PG&E customers have set up online accounts. And according to one study, consumers interact with their utilities for only six minutes a year on average.

Clean Tech Companies Search for the Secret Recipe

"We have to get it right when we have those six minutes," says Dan Yates, CEO of Opower, a smart grid technology company that's trying to find the secret sauce of behavioral change. PG&E has hired Opower to redesign the website I was looking at. (Check out a preview here.)

"People don't want data, they want insights. So, I always joke that my mom is my litmus test. And I know that she would never spend a minute looking at raw energy data. But what she would love to find out is that her freezer is very energy intensive," he says.

Working with other utilities, Opower says their program has helped households cut their energy use by one to three percent and the change sticks. They do that by showing customers how their energy use compares to similar homes in their neighborhood. (More about what motivates us).

"It's not shame. It is really just recognizing an addressable opportunity to reduce usage. And then when you start to have people's attention, the key comes down to have relevant, targeting insights," says Yates.

Yates says for utilities that are used to dealing with hardware, working with behavioral science is a new challenge. But it's one with the potential to remake the way we consume energy. PG&E's redesigned SmartMeter website will be available by the end of the year.

Genetic tests often don’t give as much information as you might think.

All sorts of goodies to try out!  I feel like a kid at Christmas.

The first thing I thought I’d do is check out my ancestry.  My grandfather’s grandmother was supposedly Native American and so I wanted to find out if I could see that in my DNA.  (This relates to my supposed relationship with the outlaw Sam Starr but that is a different story.)

23andMe has this Native American testing app in their 23andMe Labs section.  I clicked on my data and up popped this result:

Recent Native American ancestry is unlikely

Has it all been lies?  My great, great grandma wasn’t Native American?  Not so fast…

A “no” answer on a genetics test doesn’t necessarily tell you a lot.  (And sometimes, the “yes” answer isn’t so helpful either!)   Now as a geneticist, I know the drawbacks of ancestry tests like these.  What I wanted to see was if 23andMe did a good job of explaining them.

I first checked out my mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and my Y chromosome data.  These DNA don’t change a lot from generation to generation and so are really good at tracing ancestry many generations back.  Their downside for me is how they are passed down.

The Y chromosome passes from father to sons.  My great, great grandma didn’t have a Y to pass on so of course my Y chromosome data wouldn’t show that she was Native American.

mtDNA passes from mom to her children.  At first this sounds promising since we are talking about my great, great grandma until we realize that I am related to this woman through my grandfather.  His mtDNA died with him (except for his female relatives and their descendants) so that is lost to me as well.

Here is what 23andMe has written under interpretation of my mtDNA and Y chromosome results:

This mitochondrial DNA haplogroup is inconsistent with Native American ancestry along the maternal (mother's mother's mother's …) line.

This Y chromosome haplogroup is inconsistent with Native American ancestry along the paternal (father's father's father's …) line.

I suppose this says what I just said but I am not sure how many people would really appreciate the limitations of mtDNA and Y chromosome data from this explanation.  There wasn’t a link to a more explicit discussion of the limitations of this sort of testing and there wasn’t anything I could see from a quick glance at the ancestry part of the site either.  An explicit explanation would be good or maybe a figure like this one:

To me, this drives home the point that there is a whole lot of missing ancestry.  It might help if they had some sort of family tree app where you could indicate as much as you know about family relationships.  Once you’ve inputted the data, it would spit out what tests results would be useful to look at.

So the mtDNA and Y chromosome test results are of little use to me in this quest.  (And of little use to me in general as it confirms my pasty whiteness.)  Next blog I’ll deal with the rest of my DNA and what that can and can’t tell me about my great, great grandma.

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Artificial Turf. Credit: Anthony V. Thompson

And that's just the beginning. Lead has been found in venetian blinds, in pens, in the glaze of ceramic cups and bowls. It has been found in imported candies. And one Mexican folk remedy to cure stomachaches has landed a number of children in the hospital recently – a packet of powder that is almost entirely lead.

Since the effects of lead are cumulative, all those points of contamination add up.

Children's developing brains and central nervous systems are most susceptible to damage from ingesting lead. That's why a new federal standard for lead in children's products was recently put in place. And that's why the Center for Environmental Health, for one, focuses on products that come in contact with children on a daily basis.

The amount of lead in artificial turf, by itself, is unlikely to cause lead poisoning. And the same is true for the amount of lead found in lunch boxes, or in children's jewelry. But medical experts say that if kids play on artificial turf in the morning, distractedly put a charm bracelet in their mouths during class, and eat food from a lunch box with lead embedded in the vinyl – then those kids are at risk for lead impairment, such as a loss of IQ points, a sign of brain damage. For more, listen to the QUEST Radio story, or check our photos below.

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