Utilities are investing in new IT infrastructure that will allow them to give you the power to analyze in real time the electricity and natural gas usage in your home. Google's PowerMeter (in Beta) takes advantage of that new infrastructure to help you monitor household energy usage.
Waste is everywhere -- in what we throw away; the fresh water we allow to run down the drain; and the amount of electricity, natural gas, oil, propane, wood we use to heat our homes and make our lives healthier and more productive than the lives of our forebears.
But we can do things now that will have a positive impact one way or another.
A recent PG&E blog reported that a home in the United States produces twice as much CO2 emissions as an automobile. Maybe so.
But a home definitely uses more energy than it should.
If you want to realize energy savings then you need to know how much you're using right now.
There are a number of tools that will help you estimate usage -- but a new one of great promise is coming over the horizon: The Google PowerMeter.
Twenty years ago my company was involved with a similar project that included Microsoft -- that other big monolith in the IT world. The technology we were looking at would allow you to track energy use in real time. The technology was not ready in the 1980s.
But now, the world has changed and Google is once again way out in front.
Utilities are investing in new IT infrastructure that will allow them to give you the power to analyze in real time the electricity and natural gas usage in your home. PowerMeter takes advantage of that new infrastructure to help you monitor household energy usage.
PowerMeter is being tested now. A few Google employees have been working on the pilot test. Here are some of their experiences:
"The dishwasher turned out to be a big energy hog. We now wait to load it fully before starting it. Or, if it's just a couple of dishes, we wash them by hand. When we turned on our space heater, we were amazed by its power consumption. It definitely gives one a perspective on a true cost of using a $20 space heater."
"I saw the huge spikes caused by washer/dryer use, so now I make sure each wash load is full. I also noticed spikes when the home heater would turn on even when we weren't home, so I made slight adjustments to the timer to better align with our schedule. It's amazing that taking such simple steps has reduced our energy consumption by more than 10%."
Check out PowerMeter on Google's website at http://www.google.org/powermeter/
We still have a few years to go before this technology is available widely.
But you don’t have to wait – and you shouldn’t wait. You’ll be paying more for energy than you really need to.
To get an estimate, if not a real-time assessment, of your household use, try the resources listed at http://bancheromedia.blogspot.com/
Source: Banchero Media Productions
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