At last, we have the first partners in Google's quest to make your personal power consumption visible on your home computer. As the thinking goes,
if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. So Google wants to give consumers near real-time visibility to their consumption and usage patterns via Google's
PowerMeter software and utility-supplied "smart meters." The hope here, is that those aware of their energy consumption habits will change them to save money, and in turn, the planet. The initial list of partner utilities represent millions of homes spread across cities and country-sides in the US, Canada, and India:
- San Diego Gas & Electric® (California)
- TXU Energy (Texas)
- JEA (Florida)
- Reliance Energy (India)
- Wisconsin Public Service Corporation (Wisconsin)
- White River Valley Electric Cooperative (Missouri)
- Toronto Hydro–Electric System Limited (Canada)
- Glasgow EPB (Kentucky)
Google has also partnered with Itron to embed its PowerMeter software into Itron smart meters. While we applaud the effort, seeing energy consumption for the entire house, only, is far too macro (though a good first step). What we're waiting for is the marriage of this with home automation and monitoring solutions based on
Z-Wave and
ZigbBee, for example, so we can gain visibility and control down to the device level. Imagine a single software view that lets you drill all the way down to see how much energy your computer, lights, or home theater projector is consuming and then shut 'em down when not in use or to avoid
vampire drain. Hey Nokia, you're working on a
Home Control Center... you reading this? Google's looking for partners.
posted May 20th 2009 3:25AM
What a great idea! They get kudos for taking an initiative on the day Obama announces 13 states implementing laws that would require greener auto-mobiles and in a 5-6 yr span save us more oil than we imported from 4 different countries such as (Iran/Venezuela/etc...etc) [forgot the rest] this year. Not only is this better for our environment but also creates more jobs and in the long run help our economy because oil will not make up 20% of our imports thus leaving more money in Americans pockets instead of handing it over to semi-hostile countries in exchange for some black gold.
Yeah because clearly all the US automobile manufacturers have plenty of money to completely reinvent their lineups... Great timing.
And we all want death trap cars. The reason manufactures don't make small cars is because the market it small for them.
Obama's rules will actually not get rid of SUV's and Truck's. The manufacturers are just going to make some smaller and more dangerous cars to offset the bigger ones that most people want.
Recent studies shown that the last iteration of the CAFE standards (which is what Obama is adjusting) is responsible for thousands of death because it forced automakers to make smaller cars to meet the standards.
This is why I will never by a small car. They are only built to allow SUV's and Trucks to exist.
I could car less about my carbon emissions. It's not a pollutant and anybody with brain can see humans don't contribute to global warming.
All we need now is a bandwidth meter for comcast!
Well done, Obama sheep. Let me guess, you own a hypePhone too?
There's only one odd thing about this picture... don't these utility companies want people to use more energy so they can make more money? It almost seems as fake as Exxon's commercials claiming they truly support alternate natural energy sources.
Someone ought to give the Google founder a Noble Prize for Humanity award. Brilliant! A way to track power consumption is both timely for the recession and the global warming. The folks at Googleplex never stop to impress me.
"Someone ought to give the Google founder a Noble Prize for Humanity award." ? What?
Where have you been? There are similar web applets and software all over the place. Commercial grade and already in use...
Google is a business who is utilizing its API's and existing products and leveraging them in a new space..
It's not hard to export data from a logging device and create pretty graphs...
I sometimes wonder about the commentary people make.. You would think they live in the stone age
I want to give him one just because im enjoying cupcake so much!! root ftw
because i always wanted to sell my household power consumption data to anyone willing to pay... oh wait.. THEY sell it...
Yeah let's give him a Nobel prize for making a power meter! I've never seen a power meter before...except in practically every house on the planet.
@lifenewbie - don't talk down to people, just because you might know doesnt' mean everyone does !!I
I sometimes wonder about the knee jerk reaction some people make!!
It's not like the energy companies make this common knowledge ! I wonder why.......
...
if Kissinger was awarded with a Nobel Peace Price then, anything is possible, for example MS earning a award in the open source community.
Awesome. Can't wait 'til they bring it to Consumer's Energy in Michigan.
I second the vote for Consumers Energy to get these.
I don't see why Google needs to be involved with this. Sure it's Google's idea, but something like this should be done by the electricity providers themselves and not have them rely on a third party. And BTW this should have been done long ago.
They do provide this information. Ever look at your box/bill?
Far better results will come when google centralizes the R&D on something like this and then dishes it out. For instance my city (Jacksonville, FL - one of the ones on the list!) has created a bus routing web service that allows me to enter starting and ending points and it will tell me what buses to take, only it rarely recognizes address and just doesn't work very well overall. Hopefully with google on the scene the city will be convinced that riding on the coattails of google can be a huge time and money saver for everyone and they will entertain the notion of integrating our public transit with transit.google.com
Also does JEA (Jacksonville, FL) not deserve it's own bullet line?!
-Duval represent
Ah fantastic! We are going to have a new version of GTA (Google Thief Assistant). Instead of driving through residential zones, burglar could check directly on gta.google.com to select which houses are eligible for break in according to power usage patterns.
It's a joke, but not so much.
A system for individual electricity outlet measuring with zigbee and datalogging on computer already exists. it's called plugwise and can be seen in action at http://www.bwired.nl/plugwise.asp.
I understood PlugWise to be "based" on ZigBee. It was modified to allow for faster switching thus making it incompatible with other, off-the-shelf ZigBee devices. I have a friend here in Amsterdam deploying these into businesses.
Thomas
I've heard the issue with zigbee is that the licensing costs are non-trivial if you want full compliance, so there are device out there which are zigbee-alike but not necessarily fully compatible or maybe have non-standard access profiles.
If you read the forums at domotica you'll see quite a few annoyed users. Plugwise have been collecting their usage data without asking. Would you really want to use them?
@Paul
There are no licensing fees for Zigbee/Xbee stuff, it's built into the initial cost, the cost of basic units is fairly cheap.
@Thomas
it's more likely to be Digi's proprietary routing firmware than Zigbee then, since meshing would make more sense in a domestic envrionment. ( see http://www.digi.com/technology/digimesh/ )
Zigbee and zwave? Jeez do not get me started. zigbee is pretty much non existant and zwave is so finickity it's untrue - the specs aren't open so there's no chance of integration without signing NDAs yada yada. I've been looking for a replacement for x10 and so far very very unimpressed.
Here's a (typical) problem with zwave : It can't unlearn units without them being accessable - so when your bulb blows and takes a switch with it, you must FACTORY RESET your entire infrastructure and reteach it all the nodes. That and you need a neutral for your light fittings (which funnily enough isn't present in most households).
I would gladly pay some bucks to get my house's light switches completely moved over to a HA system that worked but I don't understand why no one has taken the market space between professional high end and hobbyist / consumer who knows how to wire a light switch. Any other comments gladly read btw.
Zigbee is far from non existent, Control4 alone has more than 800,000 Zigbee devices shipped thus far. The new RF4CE standard will see a huge number of remote controls for TV, DVD, Etc moving from IR to Zigbee starting later this year.
Zigbee works, and is in use today. I already have an energy metering system installed and working in my own home with Zigbee devices. It can adjust the HVAC and lighting based on load profiles and occupancy levels.
As US Domestic energy prices skyrocket over the next 3 years, these kinds of energy monitoring and management systems will be very important for keeping your home power bills in check. All of this hope and change is going to be VERY expensive.
For those in the UK, CurrentCost have been doing this for a while (and support monitoring individual devices) and Pachube allows monitoring and graphing of not only electricity, but gas etc... (basically a generic stats pipe from monitor devices).
Only problem I've had is that their datacable driver blue screens my Vista installation.
Also in the UK for Zigbee is AlertMe.com and the first part of their Energy package SmartPlugs are available now working along side their security packages. The SmartPlugs allow you to monitor energy usage via web, emai,l SMS and through the web control based on other events like turning off when you leave the home or on when someone walks into that room(based on Alertme motion sensor detection. Plus lots of other scenarios. Next will be a meter clamp to monitor household use. They have discussed Googles app on their blog. You get hooked trying all your appliances in the SmartPlugs and seeing the cost of them!! : )
The difference is that AlertMe want you to pay for the monitoring service, CurrentCost is a unit you buy and that's it. With the upcoming IAM's and things like the mousetrap dev board the Current Cost stuff is much more appealing. I don't really want to have to pay to constantly monitor my usage, I'd rather monitor it locally and use Pachube ( my example feeds are here: http://www.pachube.com/users/scaredycat/feeds ) if I want others to see it.
Fuzzy I've been an AlertMe customer for a year now so I signed up for the security package at the time and the energy side is a bonus. I haven't looked at Current Cost before but it looks very good.
They were talking about the time-of-use meters the other day in Toronto and they were interviewing angry stay-at-home moms. They thought they should be exempt. I guess they don't get it.
Doesn't canada use green niagara power? so a time-based meter is just to spy on people and milk them more huh, strange that they would object.
Common misconception. In 2007 Ontario was getting about 50% of it's power from nuclear, 25% from hydro, 20% from coal (the rest from gas and renewables).
The issue is that Ontario doesn't have enough power to always meet 100% of the demand. So in these high-demand times, we end up importing very expensive and very dirty power (coal power out of the northeast US). The smart meters are an attempt to shift the load to shave off these peaks a bit.
There is a proposed Feed-in-Tariff for solar which should pass in the next few months which would pay homeowners over $0.80 per kwh. This will help the utility increase supply, while helping the homeowner mitigate costs.
It's just annoying if you have to keep watching the clock to use power, there's no 2 ways about that.
And besides, I heard the US massively bought power from canada, and you are telling me they buy it from the US, now I'm confused.
In my area they have just a flat price and optionally you can get day/night power with a 2 counter meter, where the power during the day is slightly more expensive; but during the night it's way cheaper, so thrifty types can do the laundry at night and save a bundle. Assuming they live in homes where the noise doesn't bother the neighbours I guess.
How about using the effort for simply moving to green power, or at least give the US citizens an option, they have it in places in europe, the powercompany allows you to pick green power, then based on the percentage of people that did they have to get that percentage of power in the grid the green way, which is checked by the government. (And yes sometmes green is a bit more expensive but I for one think it's worth it.)
Once you are green you don't need to save power except to balance your home budget.
Hey, the company I work for makes the power meters for Glasgow. I knew we were in talks with Google but didn't know we had actually made a deal with them yet.
Ask a raise, you need some of that google money to buy gadgets.
Welcome to BigBrother, next step they will try to measure the CO2 we produce breathing and charge it!!!
*Eagerly waits for the PowerMeter Facebook application*
I LIVE in Glasgow. What a craphole, I can't believe we have some kind of new bleeding edge technology before someone else. The Internet is also provided by the EPB, and it crawls on most days. Please update that next EPB.
Whatever happened to that plan of google to create their own internet, and become ISP I wonder
/enable tinfoil
I am really uncomfortable with allowing the world's largest and most efficient database company to know all my crap.
Obviously, any single piece of my info is not important and is probably available from several other sources.
When anyone who is a partner with google can get a report on your email, calendar, files on your computer, search history, voice calls and messaging and power usage, one can come up with a pretty accurate profile on you. The biggest concern with that is someone can know when you are or are not at home, the 2 extremes being a thief or a rapist. The mundane concern is marketers knowing your exact habits and targeting calls, to you only when you are home.
The long term super-paranoid concern is that we will be penalized for our habits. Your car insurance goes up because your profile shows that you don't come home till abnormally late at night and may be more tired. Your health insurance goes up or services are denied because google grocery shows that you are eating outside of the WHO guidelines. ... you get fired because google bed monitor shows you are not getting enough sleep to be competent... Google Flush's stool analyzer shows that you poop too much and will be denied access to the toilet so that you have to take a dump in a bio-degradable container and bury it no less than 6ft underground and no less than 300 ft away from schools, aquifers, day-cares and any other excess poop that was buried in the last 120 days (thanks google geo-poop-cache for the help!).
:)
/disable tinfoil
cool, SDGE is on there, wonder when they'll be offering the smart meters.
ahh, found my own answer: they already have information up on their website.
Smart Meter Installation Schedule:
March 2009 – Aug 2009 - Escondido
Sept 2009 – March 2010 - Remainder of North San Diego County and Escondido
Spring 2010 - Jan 2011 - Central, South and East Counties
Aug 2010 - Dec 2011 - Orange County
I wonder if you can protest against their 'smart'-ass meters, many people don't like to be monitored 'smartly' and still others hate google, and doesn't bill gates live in california? I bet he doesn't want a google meter ;)
I have something called a KEC Unit on my house. Cuts my electricity bill by 20% a month and it only cost $400. I also have a blue line monitor that shows where I am using my electricity so it is easier to conserve. Both products can be found here:
www.princetongreen.org/markt
My dad is the COO of Itron North America. Your wish of this application in more cities will only come true if more utilities buy their advanced meters, which should increase with the news from yesterday about more money for a national smart-grid.
@ m3tric
How does me liking greener ideas for our environment and more money for our economy classify me as a "sheep" ?
I thought wanting what was best for my country was called being "Patriotic" but I guess you wouldn't know anything about that now.. would you? I did not vote for Obama so how am I a sheep or his sheep? Leave it to a true Republican supporter to call patriots "sheep". Your probably a republican supporter who voted for Mc Bush and wishes to see Obama fail no matter what... even if it means our own downfall.
And if by hype phone you are implying a G1... then I am guilty as charged.