subject: Google Measures The Households With Powermeter [print this page]
Google is planning a new software that will help us to monitor the consumption of electricity in our homes, and perhaps also to save energy: PowerMeter, this is his name, we will see in real time how much electricity we are consuming, and will be iGoogle integrated into the platform. According to the company, this software allows us to reduce energy waste by up to 15 percent.
Users can access the iGoogle platform, and then create a custom page containing small PowerMeter The Web-based applications will give an overview of granular real-time, all devices that use electricity in our house.
For now PowerMeter is only a prototype: Google users can choose to use it or not, and Google is committed not to disclose personal information to major energy companies.
Most consumers do not know the data on their energy consumption, nor cares, as said Ed Lu, one of superingegneri Google.
The PowerMeter take the data from so-called smart meters, able to estimate the amount of energy used by our devices. Worldwide there are about 40 million, but this number is expected to increase in coming years, and according to Lu could reach 100 million.
Google will display the data as graphs. You can see the energy of the day today compared with that of the previous day, or allow us to see the data on the long term.
Google also plan to make public PowerMeter API, to allow other developers to build applications connected to it. There are also ongoing agreements with major energy companies: Google says the data already collected by the detectors should be made available to you in real time, in a non-proprietary format, and managers seem to be oriented to give it exactly in this form.
For now PowerMeter has been tested privately by some Google employees at home: an employee, for example, found that an appliance was left on all night, threatening to go short and create a fire.
But according to you, PowerMeter is it really necessary?
