Google Wants To Be Your Electricity Meter 206
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."
Handy for DEA... (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Doesn't Google want togo into power trading? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Google's Real Motives (Score:2, Insightful)
This makes sense when you consider Google and their relentless pursuit of reducing [datacenterknowledge.com] their energy bill [slashdot.org].
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.
Re:already exists (Score:3, Insightful)
skeptical (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:skeptical (Score:1, Insightful)
What kind of idiot would design a power *meter* that can actually shut the power off? Still, not a totally unfair point, considering the world is running a huge surplus of idiots.
Re:Want to check your consumption? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what technology is for... so you don't have to do it yourself the hard way.
Re:Google makes it sound cute (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:skeptical (Score:3, Insightful)