Google Goes Electric

As befits a company that devours juice like a ravening fiend, Google has been increasingly dedicated to reforming the country's electricity grid. First it financed a number of alternative energy startups, investing in solar, wind, and geothermal power. Next, in conjunction with General Electric, it called for the rapid production of "smart meters," which would measure home energy consumption in real time and enable homeowners with solar panels to sell power back to utilities. Then it thought up Clean Energy 2030, a utopian dream to have the government reduce the country's reliance on fossil fuels by 88 percent. (For just a measly $4.4 trillion!) Now, Google has done what it does best: come up with a clever bit of software to help homeowners reduce energy consumption.

Today, Google rolls out PowerMeter, a software package that the company hopes will induce consumers to cut or manage energy consumption, saving the country billions of dollars in the process. Here's how it works: If you have a smart meter installed in your house (and Barack Obama's stimulus plan includes a provision to put as many as 40 million smart meters in American homes), you can log onto your iGoogle page and watch how much energy you are using in real time. This, Google engineers figure, will enable you to use energy more wisely, running clothes driers or other energy-intensive appliances in off-peak hours, for example. Once consumers know how much power they're using, and how easy it is to cut back, electrical consumption will drop by as much as 15 percent, Google.org officials claimed in a recent blog post. And for every six households that cut electricity consumption by 10 percent, the carbon emissions equivalent of a car vanishes from the environment.

Google isn't content with merely letting households analyze their electricity data; according to the New York Times, the company hopes that utilities and green technology startups will use PowerMeter's infratructure to build new applications to further reduce consumption. For example, a utility could create an app that talks to your washing machine and tells it to run in the middle of the night, when power demand is at its lowest.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect to Google's new plan is its focus on the consumer, as well as demystifying the language of energy consumption and making it accessible for everyone. Most energy efficiency initiatives deal exclusively with utilities, which, as CNet points out, are in the business of selling power, not encouraging people to use less of it. With PowerMeter, and Google's new effort to force California's public utility commission to make power consumption data available in real time to anyone who wants to see it, the company is redirecting attention to ordinary households, seeking to bypass utilities and giving ordinary households more power to control their electricity use.

Or is this just another part of Google's plot to run the world? That's what VentureBeat's Chris Morrison thinks. "[I]f Google proves it can oversee your home and devices with PowerMeter, the next logical step will be to offer direct control," he writes. "Want your TV to turn on for an 8pm show? Sure, why not. Google could make sure your morning coffee is ready when you wake up, run your dishwasher at night, or flick lights on and off while you're on vacation to keep burglars away. And every time the user wants to look at an application or change a setting, there's a chance for some face time with the [most] important product of all, Google Adsense."

With PowerMeter, we could finally see an end to our crippling reliance on fossil fuels. All we have to do is watch this ad, over and over and over ...