When Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu visited the Daily Show with John Stewart last week, he couldn’t give Stewart an honorary membership to the National Academy of Sciences, so instead Chu gave Steward a “Nerds of America Society” t-shirt.
Secretary Chu, a Nobel Prize winner who recently joined Facebook, was on Comedy Central boosting the administration’s $60 billion investment in American clean energy and energy efficiency in front of a big, young audience eager for change.
That kind of money is no laughing matter and dozens of technology companies, from GE to Google to a spate of newly incorporated startups, are lining up to compete for their slice of the pie.
Google announced Power Meter in February to help utility companies display electricity consumption data to customers via the web. Studies have shown that when consumers have real-time data (via a smart grid or home rig), they tend to consume less electricity and save money.
Microsoft fired back in June with Hohm, which doesn’t wait for smart grid deployment to begin helping homeowners save money. Give Hohm an exhaustive set of details about your home (pun intended – an Ohm is a unit for measuring electrical current) and it returns a tailored set of energy efficiency improvement recommendations.
Companies haven’t begun marketing all this fancy new smart grid technology and data to consumers yet, but that hasn’t stopped consumers from getting increasingly interested in renewable energy and energy efficiency.
via With Consumer Interest in Energy Efficiency Rising Online, Some Utilities May Be Missing Out.
Related posts:
- SAP Spotlights New Smart Grid Developments for More Energy Efficiency
- Xcel partners with Microsoft on energy-use tracking tool – Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal:
- Microsoft wants your Hohm to use the smart grid – Ars Technica
- CHEAT SHEET: Google-Microsoft Energy Smackdown, PowerMeter vs. Hohm
- Microsoft Hohm
