Google Rolls Out Home Energy Software

I just got back from the EPRI/NIST "Smart Grid" workshop in DC, and can report that every meter installed by every power company within the next couple years will support this capability, and the rollout costs are going to be borne by the taxpayer. There is a metric crapton of cash getting plowed into this very specific initiative (AMI meters, most of which can link to "home area networks" via ZigBee, all managing an ANSI standard table definition).

For reasons that I hope are somewhat obvious, Matasano has had some limited involvement with actual on-the-ground projects here. The products are there, the PO's are getting cut, meters are getting retrofitted or replaced by the tens of thousands.

I think it's hard to say whether this is good news or bad news for the current crop of "smart grid" startups. You worry maybe that this is going to be a walled garden for the utility companies, but then a lot of these meters speak open standards, and there are jurisdictions (like, all of Texas) that mandate that customers own their power data. I also heard more than one utility talking about products that were going to bypass the utility/vendor AMI networks and just do a lot of this stuff over the Internet.

One of the more interesting (or at least complex) ideas that I saw getting tossed around was Demand Response / Load Shedding startups; the idea that a startup could contract with a utility to sign customers up for a program that would trigger different power profiles (like, "turn off your air conditioner") when the utility needed it, and in return get a break on their bill.

Last year I built an application that aimed to integrate existing utility information. At first I just scrapped the info from a utility-login, but they weren't too happy about it.

I eventually met with the IT department of our local utility to strike some kind of agreement. I learned that energy history is extremely hard to come by with lots of federal laws protecting its dissemination.

I often wonder about the barriers placed on consumers in having their consumption measured. Even with Google pushing for open access, the utilities (and the government) have steadfastly refused innovation in this space. Right now there seems to be lots of niche solutions, but all of them are work-arounds because of the restrictions in place. When these chains are lifted, you'll see some rapid changes.

This is true... today. Lots of utilities are already starting to install smart meters. Unless Wattvision is able to build a large installed base in the next 2-3 years, their technology won't have meters to attach to (or they'll be doing a new device with machine vision to read the digital displays on new meters, or they'll be interfacing with the meter information in a similar way to - or from - Google).

Is Wattvision's gadget going to be free? That's the big advantage of Google.

cool, thanks for the link!