All I want for Christmas is...Google Energy Analytics. You've heard this from us a lot -- and you'll keep hearing it -- measuring is the first step. It's an old saw but a true one. You can't manage what you can't measure.
Consider how Google has put this mantra to use. In the web biz we know the awesome power of Google Analytics, the free program for measuring website performance. We have ready access in real time to an extraordinary level of detail: how long someone spends on each page, exactly where the links came from, what a consumer looked at and bought, and what browser they used.
Compare that to the ability of a typical homeowner to measure energy use in their own home. Hardly a fair fight. Measuring energy use in your home isn't so easy. In our house, for example, we use electricity for appliances and lights, fuel oil for heat (some of which is hot water baseboard but distributed by an electric blower), propane for the stove, a cute little pot-bellied coal stove for emergency power outages.... you get the idea. Getting a handle on the total energy use of even a small building like this one is complicated. Even though there's a spinning electric meter on the side of my house, it doesn't report any information to me. Believe it or not, a woman in a bright orange Central Maine Power truck has to drive here once a month to read it. She's super nice and brings treats for Theo. I've offered to read the meter for her so she can avoid the carbon footprint, but that's not allowed. Not exactly smart metering.
But all is not lost.
There are ways to assess how much energy your house is using, and where that energy is going. Electricity monitoring is a good and easy place to start. We've sought out and found the best products available now - whole house monitors and individual product monitors -- that provide real data in real time. They work well. Since we started using the Blueline Power Cost Monitor, which sits for all to view in our kitchen, the awareness of our electric use along has produced results. (See my review of the Blueline here.) And the Kill a Watt EZ individual monitors tell us just how much each appliance uses. (We're cutting back on toast.)
As great as these devices are, compared to the internet world, they're circa 1985. We long for the day when all of this information rolls up into a web interface as beautiful, intuitive and intelligent as Google Analytics. Is it so much to ask?
We predict that Google's over-arching mission: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" will in short order find applicability in the energy sector. Their steps in energy are very exciting and have received a lot of attention. We applaud them for taking a principled stance, even when it crossed into politics. More businesses need to do what Google is doing.
That said, we've just got to point out that we homeowners shouldn't be forgotten amidst all the activity around smart meters and demand response. It's time for these promising technologies to be about more than utility companies looking in and gaining control over our appliances. It needs to be just as much about giving every "home team" access to the information we need to control our own energy destinies.
Demand response and smart metering should be about democratizing energy information. And no one is better at that than Google. Here at Home Energy Resource we're on a mission to make collecting data easy. All we need from the smart folks at Google is...Google Energy Analytics. It's at the top of our list, and we've been very, very good....
