Google wants to smarten up your home with PowerMeter
By Dave Jeyes
Most homeowners know that reducing your home energy consumption can help you save money on your power bill and also helps to preserve the environment. Now Google is testing a tool that shows your home energy usage in real time so that you can reduce your carbon footprint and save some green.
Often homeowners receive very little information about their energy consumption from their utility companies. At the end of the month when the bill arrives, it’s too late to understand the impact of turning on a television or leaving on a lamp.
Google PowerMeter was created to provide real-time statistics on home energy appliance usage. The intent is that if you can see when your consumption spikes, you can better manage your bill.
Most utility companies don’t provide any kind of real-time home energy monitoring tools for consumers. Access to these tools can help an average family save anywhere from 5 to 15 percent on their power bill.
Instant access to energy usage makes it much easier for a homeowner to find the appliances responsible for the largest power spikes. With this information, homeowners can make better decisions about where and when to invest in more efficient appliances.
Currently Google engineers are testing out PowerMeter, but it’s not widely available yet. Google hopes to work with power companies to provide this dashboard to consumers.
The engineers testing Google PowerMeter have made a number of discoveries about their own consumption. One found that installing CFL bulbs reduced her overall consumption by 13 percent and another found that a defective toaster had hummed through the night and was ready to catch fire.
One engineer testing the PowerMeter cut $3,000 from his electricity bill. Even if homeowners aren’t concerned about their carbon footprint, the cost savings is enough to make this new tool worthwhile.
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February 10th, 2009
President Barack Obama recently asked Congress “to act without delay” to pass legislation to double alternative energy production in the next three years and build a new electricity “smart grid.” This smart grid would be an updated digital version of the electric wires strung across our country in the past century. What makes it “smart” is that the lines would be buried and more efficient and would give homeowners feedback on how efficiently they were using the power inside their homes.
This new smart grid would cost about $400 billion over 10 years but would save between $46 billion and $117 billion over the next 20 years by reducing inefficiencies and power failures, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. It also would help to make us less dependent on imported energy and to reduce climate change. For example, if the smart grid were even 5 percent more efficient, it would keep as many carbon emissions from the atmosphere as eliminating 53 million cars.
A smart grid allows power from residential solar panels, small wind turbines, and plug-in electric vehicles to be fed into the grid. This would encourage the green energy industry by allowing small players, such as individual homes and small businesses, to sell power to their neighbors or back to the grid. It would provide another source of income for larger commercial businesses that have renewable or backup power systems that can provide clean energy for a price during peak demand, such as midday in July when the air conditioning is cranked.
Another brilliant feature of the proposed grid is the potential to use cars to store electricity and then feed it back into the grid during times of peak demand. “Vehicle to grid,” or V2G, technology helps balance energy loads by “valley filling” (charging at night, when demand is low) and “peak shaving” (sending power back to the grid when demand is high). This would help utility companies keep voltage and regulation stabler. It would be especially useful when more of our power came from intermittent power sources, such as solar panels, which only produce power during the day.
Power outages are less problematic for a smart grid because it quickly can isolate the problemand create energy pathways around it. This makes a smart grid “self-healing” by reducing power outages and saving money. Buried power lines also would reduce outages caused by harsh winter storms, when tree branches are likely to down power lines. In my community, residents are concerned about proposed power lines that would stretch through the centers of many small downtowns and across lovely vistas. If these same lines were buried, there would be fewer objections from the community.
The smart grid could help consumers use that energy more wisely and save money, as well. A sensor in your home can tell you the price of electricity when the demand is highest. This allows you to set priorities so that you use more energy when the price is lower and less during peak demand. You also can find out which appliances are energy hogs and identify energy vampires that you may not have known about.
Austin, Texas, has been working on a smart grid since 2003, when its utility company first replaced a third of its manual meters with wireless smart meters. Austin currently manages 200,000 smart meters, smart thermostats and sensors across its service area and expects to be supporting 500,000 devices this year. Boulder, Colo., started a smart grid project in August 2008. The smart grid extends into homes through home automation network devices. These devices automatically set thermostats, reduce energy loads during peak times, and shut off lights in rooms when no one is in them.
By investing in our infrastructure, we also would stimulate economic growth and increase green jobs. Thousands of peoplewould be put to work across the country designing, building and installing smart grid technology. Having the grid in place wouldmake electric carsmore feasible and affordable. Renewable energy would become more viable, and demand would increase as more electric carswere added to the grid. It also would bring the price of homeand business-scaled renewable power systems down because the payback periods would decrease. Businesses may make tidy profits by selling excess power back to the grid.
Want to learn more about the smart grid? The U.S. Department of Energy has an easy-tounderstand publication you can download online called “The Smart Grid: An Introduction.” The DOE is conducting a series of smart grid e-forums to discuss issues surrounding the smart grid, including costs, benefits, implementation and deployment. Thank you !
February 10th, 2009
Part of the reason that Google launched this project is that the Smart Grid system won’t provide usage information back to consumers- those with the most ability to affect consumption.
Hopefully between the two of them, we can start to be more conscious of our carbon footprint as a country.
February 12th, 2009
Is there such a thing as too connected?
February 12th, 2009
Anyone else getting tired of hearing that “Google wants too ________” (fill in the blank).
Google is coming up with all sorts of services that are eroding privacy. It is making me re-evaluate the rumour that its original source of funding came from the CIA.