What are your goals for 2024? Five years ago I started Boxbrite with a few people and a goal of using data to help make a difference in how we produce and use electricity. We also had a goal of providing opportunities for people who might fall between the cracks, particularly newcomers. Often newcomers bring a wealth of knowledge and perspectives that get overlooked.
Earlier this week to celebrate the start of a new year, a group of us gathered from different cultures and countries for supper and talked about how we might use data to make the world better in 2024.
As human beings we can’t survive without water and for some people water remains a scarce resource and difficult to obtain either due to climate or war. Yet living in the West we often take our water and electricity for granted, assuming it will be there when we turn the tap or turn on our light switch.
We might complain about the price or notice if our water pressure is low or the power goes out but don’t think about the complex systems that accomplish this. If we live in an apartment building we expect the water pressure to be the same at the top of the building as the bottom. We don’t think about the water pumps and systems required to bring water at the correct pressure to our taps seamlessly. As long as we get our water or electricity we aren’t aware of any leaks or losses in the system bringing these resources to us.
For the last five years as a company we’ve been focused on working with the data from solar PV systems. We’ve gotten extremely good at being able to identify, quantify and then help people address problems. Yet too often we see that problems unaddressed for a variety of reasons. We will point out the problem and find ourselves ignored. We are realizing that data like water needs to get pumped to the needed people and properly distributed in order to be useful and acted upon. When distributing water you are always fighting against gravity trying to pull it back to sea level. With data you are often fighting against our natural human tendencies to ignore potentially bad news. Only when the data becomes impossible to ignore or in many cases the public becomes aware do people pay attention. Often by that time everything explodes because people didn’t act on the data they had earlier.
Think about the FTX implosion where a company valued at $32B became worthless in just over a week costing millions of investors billions when Ian Allison published this approximately 500 word article on November 2nd, 2022. They primarily used publicly available data to expose the relationship between FTX and Alameda Research. The use of data in this way isn’t new. Often when I’m describing what we do I use the American automobile industry in the 60s as an example. More people died on the roads per year in the 60s than do today. Ralph Nader in 1965 wrote Unsafe at Any Speed detailing how the automobile industry wasn’t concerned about making their vehicles safer, only profits. Now we wear seatbelts and have airbags because of this. Of course Ford went on to then build the Ford Pinto but this Mother Jone’s article in 1977 and their expose showed they really hadn’t learned their lesson. The article is long but sobering. As we rush to build new PV systems we need to remember they are supposed to produce reliably for 20 plus years, not start having problems emerge in a few months or years without trying to understand why as you will see in my Metrolinx analysis below.
Data is like water in that it can be extremely powerful when harnessed and used properly. As we talked around the supper table we realized that a lot of the data we’ve been working with and the knowledge we’ve gain can potentially be extremely helpful as we work to address climate change. We need to better understand what is working, what isn’t and what we need to change. Our planet depends on it!
I loved the movie Pay It Forward and the rules a seventh-grade teacher challenges his students with are simple: 1) It has to be something big that really helps people, 2) It must be something they can’t do for themselves, and 3) The benefactor has to aid three other people in need.
As we talked around the table we realized that our data, experience and passion could make a difference if we were willing to try. We can’t share customer data but we could share public data, problems, knowledge etc. We’ve can already access data from thousands of publicly available systems using a variety of platforms. We can probably offer our services to even more organizations who maybe lack the internal capabilities to find the “leaks” who would be willing to share their data if asked with us and the public to help aid research and our collective understanding.
Shouldn’t we who live in comfortable warm houses with easy access to water and electricity pay it forward for what we have already benefited from?
Last month I wrote an article offering to analyze Metrolinx’s systems performance for a number of months. I also then submitted a comment about my article using their online portal. Not surprisingly I didn’t receive anything back. However, I did another report for December and will again submit it and a link to this article. December was a step backwards since the Oakville GO system stopped reporting after only eight days of operation.
When working with data or water you typically need to keep pushing until you reach sufficient pressure to make things happen
My challenge to you in 2024 is can you use data to make a positive change in the world? Now you may need to find a way to package and deliver it to the right place to have an impact. You may face resistance and rejection along the way but isn’t the goal worth it?
Also if you have any interest in the public data we have available feel free to reach out to us. Over the years, we’ve been approached by a number of individuals interested in doing something with the data to help pay it forward.