Google PowerMeter Update: APIs Soon. Appliance Specific? Maybe Not.

Ed Lu, chief engineer of Google's team charged with developing the much anticipated PowerMeter project, unveiled a few more details about what we can expect from the energy measuring and managing tool during a speech at ConnectivityWeek 2009 conference. Two points were of particular interest to us. The first is that Lu seemed eager to dispel some of the mythic build up over what PowerMeter is going to be able to accomplish. He made a point of noting that Google will open up its APIs as soon as possible in order to benefit from development from other quarters, opening up the doors for all interested parties to contribute to making the PowerMeter as effective as possible.

Greentech reported Lu as saying, "We think we have a good solution. But we'd like to see lots of entities trying to get this information out to people." This is fundamentally good news. There has been a wellspring of thought directed toward managing energy usage of late. Inviting more thinkers to the table ultimately will speed the process by inviting more tools and systems, and may well increase the odds that the tools developed will encapsulate not only electricity use, but also oil and gas. We'd love to see that development take shape, so that homeowners will be able to view energy usage as a whole.

On a more personal note, we were interested in Lu's comment that Google PowerMeter may not focus its attention, as previously believed, on developing appliance specific measurement techniques. "People have very little difficulty identifying the peaks" in power use by major home appliance or system, he said. Outside of that, "The small stuff doesn't amount to much."

We have to concur with Lu's findings. Since projecting our electricity usage in real time on the web, in an easily readable, annotated visualization format, it's become very clear to us both when the peaks in our usage occur, and what is causing them, without sweating the small stuff. The simple visualization of high-energy devices - dryers, dishwashers - seems, from a simple behavioral modification standpoint, to get the job done. Appliance-based monitoring systems, furthermore, inject a complexity that means they'll take awhile to achieve ubiquity.  Although we yearn for a future in which all appliances are "smart," the number of smart plugs, smart sockets, and upgraded appliances that would need to be integrated into our households to make an appliance-based system effective, as well as the data gaps that would accompany a necessarily piecemeal application, make the idea of a whole-house, appliance-based monitoring system seem, to us, a misplaced focus right now.

We continue to watch Google PowerMeter with interest and excitement. Lu's recent comments reinforce our sense that this tool will be designed with the end user in mind. Google, furthermore, has hinted enough times that they'll soon partner with consumer-level monitoring devices that we're expecting this news soon.