The Home Camp Christmas Party 17 Dec 09

With Christmas just around the corner, we decided to have a party for the HomeCamp community.  All hardware hackers and homecampers are welcome to come along.

Signup at Eventbrite

Where?

Held at the Horse and Groom pub, 28 Curtain Road, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 3NZ

3pm – midnight

Nearest tube: Liverpool Street – Map

The Christmas Lights Hack Competition

We’re running a competition for the best Christmas lights hack.  So bring along your prototypes with a chance to win prizes from tinker.it and Current Cost.

Our Sponsors

The Home Camp Christmas Party sponsors are Redmonk, Rabbit MQ, Current Cost and Onzo.  We have a free bar until the budget runs out, so arrive early for free beer!

The week in news…

What with the UK government officially announcing their smart meter plans and Beijing having a (first?) smart grid conference, it’s been a busy week in the news for home energy monitoring. The main focuses have been on the costs of mass implementation, how much more the tech will innovate and the need to educate consumers for any degree of success.

• Living in the USA? Clean tech jobs and big investment are coming to a state near you.
• The government outlines their thinking on smart meters for every home by 2020 – includes £6m earmarked to help suppliers develop smart technology – not quite on the level of the US investment, but a start. The question most often raised is how smart are the government being in their introduction of smart tech? Notably…
• While I’m never a fan of the Daily Fail, it’s interesting to see what the backlash against smart meters is going to look like. Cost to the consumer is the major concern. Is the government’s reliance on competition between energy suppliers to drive down costs passed on to consumers enough?
• A nation of power stations? A fair proportion of energy production is going to go local over the next ten years. Smart meters should include a measurement of power fed back into the grid in order to maximise their usefulness.
• Why China is going to implement the smart grid quicker than India. A more in depth analysis of the Beijing smart grid conference can be found here – particularly interesting to hear the view of wind power as clean energy but dirty technology.
• This comment on a recent survey of US and Canadian consumers shows there’s agreement across the pond that the mass roll out of smart meters won’t work without accompanying consumer education. So how best to facilitate that?