Google pushes for open Energy data, launches PowerMeter
February 10, 2009 – Graeme Sutherland – Print
Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, has today announced Google PowerMeter, a tool that will take energy consumption data from smart household energy meters and make the data available and easy to understand.
This will be very useful to bring social energy measurement alive, where you and I can compare our energy use and work out how to reduce it. It helps that Google.org are also pushing for free and open access to energy data for consumers. This from their December submission to Californian energy regulators:
Accordingly, Google urges the Commission to include the following principles in its smart grid policy, discussed in greater detail below:
- Consumers should have direct access to real-time electricity usage information.
- Electricity usage information should be freely available to consumers.
- Electricity usage data should be made available in a standardized, open format, freely available to third-parties with permission from the consumer.
Freely available, standardised, open access to real-time energy data. Once consumers have that, they can close the loop and easily reduce consumption.
The Google PowerMeter looks like access to smart meter billing information placed into some energy visualizations tools, and what also looks like some detection of the signature of particular appliances energy use.
Here’s an introductory video:
That all looks very cool.
The part that really interests me is that this gives a big push forward for open access to energy data, which then allow a whole ecosystem of tools and applications to develop to aid people in reducing their energy consumption, CO2 emissions, and money spent on energy.
Once we can make these energy measurements available, we can make them social, compare with each other, learn and save energy.
For a long time the big energy industries haven’t been too interested in opening up and giving us information, especially real-time information.
Let’s hope PowerMeter comes out of testing soon, and we get to see it operating here in the UK. And let’s get these open standards up and running ASAP. We’ve got a lot of measuring to do and changes to make to bring our energy consumption down.
That ecosystem you’re talking about is already forming. There’s a whole community of people already logging their energy usage and uploading it to the web to share and compare with others.
I’m building some hardware to wirelessly monitor the energy usage of individual appliances and you can see the current data live on the web.
There are plenty of others playing around with similar projects, and a group of us got together last year to share ideas and experiences at Homecamp 08. The next one has just been announced and will be taking place in early April.
Hi Adrian, thanks for the info and reminder about Homecamp. Just signed up for Homecamp 09 and looking forward to it. I come from a hardware hacking background, and have spent about ten years around lighting automation, energy management and now a lot of social co2 measurement and reporting.
So, for me it is all about good visualisations and web tools to help people see what they are using and reduce their gas and electricity consumption. If we have smart meters all over the place, and some open standards, that make it easy for web apps to show up to make it social.
I wonder if the google.org folk would like to come to Homecamp?
Great, I’ll see you there then. There was some discussion at Homecamp 08 about visualisation and either collaborative or competitive usage sharing, but not enough to draw any conclusions about areas to explore. Maybe you could chair another session on it at Homecamp 09?
I assume you’ve seen Dan Hill’s excellent The Personal Well-Tempered Environment? I think the privacy and potential negative side-effects are a bigger problem than his hand-waving suggests but it’s thought-provoking stuff.