February 11, 2009 by Mark Isle
Today sees the announcement of yet another altruistic plan to save us from Uncle Google. It involves the one of the search engine giant’s top pet issues, the environment, and specifically energy conservation. It’s called Google Power Meter, it’s an application designed to provide us with information regarding our energy use on a real time basis, so that we can really get to grips with the levels of energy being wasted by our society every day.
The application, which is currently being tested by Google developers, will construct graphs of electricity and gas use through the iGoogle portal. It’s the brainchild of developers at Googtle.org, the philanthropic wing of Google.
It will rely upon information from smart meters, a new type of energy meter that tracks energy use in more detail than current energy meters do. Currently there are only 40 million Smart meters in use worldwide though another 100 million are planned to be installed next year. For this reason, Power Meter is really more of a tool for the future, as these types of meters become more and more ubiquitous, the quality of the information available on Power Meter will become more and more reliable and more and more relevant.
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