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Google Wants To Be Your Electricity Meter
An anonymous reader writes "Google has teamed up with microcontroller maker Microchip to develop an API for a piece of software called Google PowerMeter, according this EE Times story. Why? Because Google wants to host all the details of the electricity and other energy consumption of people's homes. It wants to do this so that it can show people on their iGoogle homepages when and where they are consuming energy so that they can start to reduce their power consumption. The good news is that it is an opt-in service and free so you don't have to make Google your energy-monitor if you don't want to do so."
Now the Man can monitor consumption and infer when a weed growing operation is up and running.
Note electricity consumption, cruise by with thermal cameras to verify, profit!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I seem to remember that elsewhere it was said that Google wanted to enter the power market. They are a pretty big consumer themselves and are apparently looking to be a supplier but as yet, are not a producer.
Energy trading is a complex game. Perhaps they hope to get a better advantage by themselves getting better knowledge of how much power people are busing and when.
This makes sense when you consider Google and their relentless pursuit of reducing their energy bill.
A lot of people have no idea how much electricity they are consuming, except at the end of the month. Increasing awareness will encourage people to turn off unused lights in their house (and get the instant gratification of seeing the electricity consumption graph go down on their homepage). This serves a dual purpose. Cutting down on consumption will mean a surplus of electricity, which lowers the price. Google gets cheaper electricity, and it also helps the environment.
I don't think Google is particularly interested in selling your electric power consumption data, although they might want to look at large-scale statistical data for their own research.
I've been wanting something like a Flukso but it says that they log the results on their server. Is there any way to redirect this and log your own stats on your own server?
Am I the only one who is skeptical of these smart meter devices? I don't want hackers to be shut off my power or anything else.
That's what technology is for... so you don't have to do it yourself the hard way.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Actually, yes I do. Throughout the day the cost of power varies widely. At night it is dirt cheap (because it is produced at a coal or nuclear or hydro power plant) but during the day more plants have to be brought online and shut down as the load varies. That makes it very expensive at some times during the day. For residential consumers, this just gets averaged and they get pretty much a flat rate (some places have a time based tier system). But, if I got charged the current price for power, and could have my house decrease or increase power consumption based upon that price, then my cost would go down, and the total cost of the power grid would go down (because the load is more stable). I don't think they should have the ability to force me to turn off any appliance, but it would be good for the whole system if you let the free market determine the price of power through consumers setting their own limits of which appliances can be running at different price points.