The theory is that people stop doing all the other household, energy-sucking, activities, like laundry, during the game, and they also congregate in one space, leaving lights off throughout the rest of the home. People also attend Super Bowl parties at each other’s homes, leaving their own homes powered down. Last year the Super Bowl saved the homeowners a collective three million dollars in energy costs.

That’s all very interesting, but how does that help you save money on your energy bill?

(Read More: Why Cold Weather Super Bowl Could Be a Financial Boon)

“What Opower does is we work with utilities across the globe to take boring energy data and turn it into interesting insights into people’s energy usage and use those insights to communicate to consumers and to change their behavior,” says Alex Laskey, president and founder of Opower.

(Read more: For Super Bowl Ads, It’s Go Viral or Go Home)

Opower works with 83 utilities, helping their 50 million customers save money on their home energy bills. They say they will help Americans save over $200 million in the next twelve months, about half of what the solar energy industry saves U.S. homeowners each year. Laskey describes how:

“So instead of a bill that comes at the end of the month that is frustrating and confusing because it’s high, and it’s too late to do anything about it, you get a proactive alert that might come in text message or a phone call. It says, you know what, it’s only a week into the month, but you’re on track for a bill that’s 40 percent higher than your typical bill, and here are the things you ought to do to make sure you don’t have the high of a bill at the end of the month.”

Customers will never know these insights come from Opower, because the utilities paying for the information brand it as their own. Whatever the messenger, the message is simple: Studying consumer behavior can help change consumer behavior. That is more important than ever as technology increasingly drives society.

Social media, as much as it connects us ideologically, separates us physically. Just knowing that when we do get together physically, for an event like the Super Bowl or otherwise, we are saving energy, might just change some of our behavior going forward.

Every little bit helps the planet.

(Read more: 12 Unusual Super Bowl Bets)

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100427313

There were senior executives from San Francisco’s Metrus Energy, which committed $75 million of private capital to the initiative, and from Sunnyvale’s Serious Energy and Santa Rosa’s Ygrene Energy Fund, both contributing $100 million.

They’re among the 60 private companies and other entities “stepping up,” in Obama’s words, in an effort to retrofit public and commercial buildings nationwide, pitching in approximately half of the $4 billion needed. The rest of the funding for the “Better Buildings Challenge” will come from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Other Bay Area partners include San Francisco’s Shorenstein Properties, which has been instituting a number of energy-saving programs across its real estate portfolio, and Oakland’s Renewable Funding, which manages San Francisco’s $100 million program to retrofit older commercial buildings.

“It’s an effort to bring together the private sector to jump-start the whole energy efficiency sector,” said the firm’s president, Francisco DeVries, who was also present at the White House launch.

Obama said the aim of the initiative is to increase energy efficiency in commercial and public buildings by 20 percent by 2020 – the retrofits are projected to save U.S. businesses $40 billion in energy costs while creating 50,000 jobs.

With no new legislation needed, and no new taxpayer money, “it’s the nearest thing we’ve got to a free lunch in a tough economy,” remarked former President Bill Clinton, who helped round up corporate participants.

Thomas Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who has had his differences with the White House, agreed. “This is a surefire way to create jobs and make our nation’s buildings more energy efficient,” he said in a statement.

In September, Ygrene Energy Fund said it was investing $650 million to finance commercial building retrofits nationwide, beginning with Sacramento and Miami-Dade County.

Metrus Energy, which provides 100 percent financing for private companies’ energy efficiency projects, and gets paid back from the savings realized, counts the German company Siemens and the British company BAE Systems among its clients.

Metrus CEO Bob Hinkle, who was at the White House on Friday, says he is greatly encouraged by the initiative.

“Energy efficiency is finally getting the prominence and attention that it deserves,” he said. “In terms of importance, it’s now on a par with energy supply.”

At least, hopefully, getting there.

– More information on the Better Buildings Challenge, including participants, at sfg.ly/vSsDbA.

Sign of the times: From headquarters of major metropolitan newspaper to an international call center.

Such is the destiny of the Oakland Tribune Tower, the 21-story, 85,000-square-foot historic building, which fell into receivership and has just been sold for the low-low price of $8 million to a company called CallSocket.

The sale will result in the creation of 2,300 jobs in Oakland over the next three years, with CallSocket taking up half of the building and hiring 300 people for its operations there, and other tenants moving in, according to Bluett Associates, the Sacramento real estate firm that handled the transaction.

Blogging: www.sfgate.com /columns/bottomline. Facebook page: sfg.ly/doACKM. Tweeting: @andrewsross. E-mail: bottomline@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page D – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/06/BUID1M8HG4.DTL&type=business

What does the consumer price index (CPI) have to tell us about the future of the housing market?

Apparently a lot.

Let me first explain a few things for those of you housing types who don’t follow this monthly number. The CPI is the most common way to measure inflation. There’s the big number and then what’s called the “core” number, which is the big number minus food and energy costs (gas prices obviously skewing things a lot these days). The big number was pushed down thanks to a drop in gasoline prices, but the core number was higher than expected, thanks to housing.

One component of the CPI is the “Owners Equivalent Rent,” (OER) measures the amount of money it costs to live somewhere, anywhere, be it a rental apartment or your own home.

“The key factor in the higher than expected core rate was a .2 percent rise in Owners Equivalent Rent, the biggest gain since March ’09,” writes Peter Boockvar of Miller Tabak. “This figure is important because it makes up 25 percent of CPI and 40 percent of the core. Apartment landlords are gaining pricing power as vacancies fall as the homeownership continues its decline. This is a secular trend and will result in a further lift in core inflation going forward.”

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Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/43769306?__source=RSS*blog*&par=RSS