We have followed the developments of Google PowerMeter with unflagging interest for the past six months, and were interested to learn on Tuesday that the enterprise has announced its first round of partners. The Financial Times Blog did some leg work to determine how many customers were served by each of those partners, as well. The utilities, for now, are:
TXU Energy (Texas): 2m customers
JEA (Florida): 360,000 customers
Reliance Energy (India): 25m consumers
Wisconsin Public Service (Wisconsin): 488,000 regulated electric utility customers
White River Valley Electric Co-operative (Missouri): Not immediately obvious (But is has the zaniest company website we’ve ever seen)
Toronto Hydro-Electric System (Canada): 684,000 customers
Glasgow EPB (Kentucky): Also not immediately obvious, but presumably small
Google is also partnering with Itron, a data and meter management company that serves nearly 8,000 utilities.
The partnership announcement - and in particular, Google's selection of geographically and demographically diverse utilities - is excellent news. Many of us have been excited about Smart Meters, but cautiously so, because much remains to be seen with respect to how utilities will implement them. Smart Meters are only effective if we get the data we need, and in some of the first implementations we've seen (such as Hydro's announcement up in Peggy's neck of the woods), it's become evident that some programs aren't ready to give consumers real-time data.
PowerMeter brings Smart Meters to fruition, giving consumers (rather than just utilities) real-time information about home energy usages so that they can, as Timothy Hurst of Clean Technica puts it, "Use their energy more efficiently, save money on their monthly bill, and be able to monitor/reduce household carbon emissions."
Honestly, we can't wait to see this program implemented. Google expects to roll it out later this year.
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