EU Energy Policy Blog

Google has introduced a way to make electricity usage information easily accessible from anywhere.

Need the address for a restaurant, directions to the nearest pharmacy or information about a book someone mentioned in passing? Want to find out the background of the blind date you are about to meet, local weather, your favorite stocks or anything else? Look it up on Google – correct? No wonder “google” is now commonly used as a verb, as in, “Did you google him?”

As time goes on, Google is emerging as the place to look for anything and everything one might possibly want or need. And that fact has not escaped the smart people of Google whose goal is to gather all available information and present it in ways that is useful and easy to use. The result is that more people come to Google for more things every day, which creates even more traffic to Google – exactly as intended.

That much everyone knows about Google, and most people give them credit for providing the answers to the word searches quickly and correctly. But what surprises many is that Google has been progressively and aggressively moving into the energy space.

• First came the announcement that the company likes renewable energy resources, and wants it fast and cheap.
• Next came energy policy positions that – frankly – made more sense than the stuff coming out of the US Department of Energy.
• This was followed by a joint statement with General Electric Company to collaborate on the smart grid.

The latest development, however, is even more interesting and potentially significant. Google is not just talking about the smart meter, smart pricing and beyond the meter applications but has just unveiled PowerMeter, a product that – while still rough and primitive – may leave the utility industry in the dust.

In late May, Google announced a partnership with 8 utilities in 6 states in the US plus Canada and India to enable roughly 10 million customers to “access detailed information on their home energy use.” What is different about the new product is that consumers can view simple graphical displays of their power usage more or less in real time from anywhere there is access to the Internet, which is becoming virtually universal. Google has selected Itron as its metering partner, a huge feat for Itron.

The usage data, while not utility billing grade, is passable. Likewise, the pricing information is currently primitive – or has to be supplied by the customers, but it is good enough for the typical customer to get the gist of it. The project was originally launched with 200 Google employees each equipped with a simple device that records and reports the household’s electricity consumption every 15 minutes via the Internet to Google. That data can then be viewed by each volunteer with a security code.

Google is clear on its policy that the usage information belongs to the customers, and it is the customers’ choice to share it with other intermediaries if they choose to do so. But the clear intention is to make the data easily available to others, allowing them to develop specific applications to serve customers’ needs – what ever they happen to be.

What sorts of applications may evolve? For anyone who has witnessed a live demonstration of PowerMeter, it does not take a lot of imagination to see the sheer simplicity of the idea and the fact that easy access through the Internet will make electricity usage and price data ubiquitous.

The power industry has been talking – and talking – about smart metering and variable pricing for quite a long time. Lately, it has started to invest billions in advanced metering infrastructure or AMI. An increasing number of trials and experiments have been offered of late – far too many, some would argue. But here is a newcomer who has been in business less than a decade, knows relatively little about the power sector, and yet is poised to offer a solution that has eluded the industry for decades. Would it not be ironic if Google were to be the first to offer a simple gateway to the home, the meter and the devices beyond the meter?

Google figures that many of us visit its website frequently. With iGoogle, it offers a personalized way to read the news, check the weather, the traffic, the stocks – and now – electricity consumption data and the means to remotely adjust device settings – from where ever we may be.

Talking to PowerMeter people, it is clear that not everybody in the industry is enamored with the idea of working with Google, or going through Google gateway to reach the customers. Having invested billions of dollars on fancy two-way communication technology to be told of an easier and cheaper way to communicate with the customers must be a setback for some utilities.

“Companies who are in this camp are obviously not the ones who have been talking to us,” one Google insider said.

But the reality is that utility customers are not going to spend a lot of time and effort to read their meter information on utility websites even if they could easily do this. But these same customers are far more likely to be visiting Google for something else they need – and that may ultimately turn PowerMeter into a powerful tool to manage electricity consumption on truly large scale and at very low cost.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 7th, 2009 at 11:46 am and is filed under Electricity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.