Googles Announces PowerMeter

NyTimes has an article about Google’s announcement today.

Google Taking a Step Into Power Metering

Published: February 9, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — Google will announce its entry Tuesday into the small but growing business of “smart grid,” digital technologies that seek to both keep the electrical system on an even keel and reduce electrical energy consumption.

Skip to next paragraph

Related

Times Topics: Google Inc.

Google is one of a number of companies devising ways to control the demand for electric power as an alternative to building more power plants. The company has developed a free Web service called PowerMeter that consumers can use to track energy use in their house or business as it is consumed.

Google is counting on others to build devices to feed data into PowerMeter technology. While it hopes to begin introducing the service in the next few months, it has not yet lined up hardware manufacturers.

“We can’t build this product all by ourselves,” said Kirsten Olsen Cahill, a program manager at Google.org, the company’s corporate philanthropy arm. “We depend on a whole ecosystem of utilities, device makers and policies that would allow consumers to have detailed access to their home energy use and make smarter energy decisions.”

“Smart grid” is the new buzz phrase in the electric business, encompassing a variety of approaches that involve more communication between utility operators and components of the grid, including transformers, power lines, customer meters and even home appliances like dishwashers.

Google continues to grab the mindshare, and leveraging President Obama’s changes.

The stimulus bill now going to a House-Senate conference committee has allocated $4.4 billion for “smart” technologies, including four million of these next-generation monitors, called smart meters. Proponents say that could make more effective use of existing power lines and generate employment.

“You can hire a lot of people to install smart meters,” said James Hoecker, a former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has some jurisdiction over transmission lines.

Also, thanks to OSIsoft’s Pat Kennedy for forwarding this article, and reminding me we had talked about this idea a couple of years ago, and it is interesting to see Google is a  market player.

Read more

IBM Announces Plans for 21st Century Infrastructure

IBM has made their most recent announcement in their Green Initiatives. From a marketing release standpoint, they are saying a lot of good things as IBM spends more money than any other IT company researching the green market.  I was impressed early on when some Green IBM guys understood the issue with the world’s water supply and were not only focused on energy.

IBM Unveils Building Blocks for 21st Century Infrastructure

Drives Convergence of Rapidly Expanding Digital and Physical Infrastructures; Addresses $122 billion Market Opportunity

ARMONK, NY - 09 Feb 2009: IBM today announced new services and products to help clients build a new, more dynamic infrastructure that will bring more intelligence, automation, integration, and efficiencies to the digital and physical worlds.  As a result, it will enable businesses and governments to better respond to and manage challenges presented by today's globally integrated planet.

The new products and services enable clients to use powerful computing systems to manage and gain insight from an increasing number of things in their physical infrastructure that are being instrumented with intelligent sensors.  For example, a utility could build a smart grid to eliminate wasted power, delivering power to where it is needed most, in real time.  A smart grid also helps a utilities' customers to monitor their energy consumption in real time and view stresses in its electrical grid instantly to schedule pre-emptive maintenance.  

Key requirements for the new dynamic infrastructure are:

  • The integration of digital and physical infrastructure, providing the ability to use information technology to manage business processes, increasingly intelligent physical infrastructure and assets, and drive new and improved services as a result.
  • The ability to manage, store, and analyze the 15 new petabytes of information the world is now generating per day-- eight-times more information than in all US libraries combined.   This will enable clients to address massive information management requirements associated with today's governance, compliance, availability, retention, risk, and security challenges.
  • A reduction of massive inefficiencies and greater resilience in today’s interconnected world.  Data centers costs, for example -- for energy, space, etc. -- have risen eight-times since 1996; and average distributed server utilization is just 6-15%.
Read more

Modeling and Monitoring Top Mistake, Waiting for Risk to Eliminating

I recently had the chance to watch a situation where a person was presented with a strategic decision.  I was presented the same situation.  My decision was made in seconds, deciding what needs to be achieved, how priorities need to be shifted, the overall effects are thought of in minutes. There are unknowns, resolve them, ignore others, but keep moving.

The other person spent the first 24 hours wanting more information; the follow on 24 hours evaluating the various alternatives.  Then finally after 72 hours, deciding on action, and within 12 hours changed their mind again.  As much time as the person spent, collecting more information, analyzing the situation, they still could not make a decision.  And, anything they did now was a waste.  They missed the opportunity.

I was in a conf call last night (sunday) where a group of us were discussing modeling, and it reminded me of how the group of us saw the opportunity and knew we needed to move fast.  In my above example, we made decisions and started moving.  The other way which we didn’t have present in the meeting is “I need more information before I can make a decision. Let’s reduce the risk.”

I haven’t blogged much over the last week as I have been dealing the with crisis situation I mention in the first paragraph, but I’ll get back to blogging as soon I resolve the situation.

Read more

Controlling Your Cloud Computing with an iPhone

AWS has a post about their new iPhone Console Application.

iPhone Console for EC2

This is a very brief post to call your attention to yet more innovation in the Amazon Web Services ecosystem: in this case an iPhone console application that monitors and controls your Amazon EC2 environment. David Kavanagh and company cooked this up over at directThought.

My mind immediately went to "Sitting in Maui, umbrella drink by the pool, time to add a few more instances to my Amazon EC2 server fleet by tapping on the iPhone. Ahhh..." Then reality struck -- it's snowing outside the hotel I'm in.

The underlying client toolkit (cTypica) is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.

You can preview the application here. Now is your chance to provide input on what will be a very useful tool for AWS users who have an iPhone.

Mike

This post will give me an excuse to ping Mike (at amazon) as I haven’t chatted with him for a while.

Read more

Consumer Reports Reviews Kill a Watt & Watt’s Up, Guess What – they are accurate

Consumer reports reviews 2 watt measuring devices.

Both devices are sold only online. Kill A Watt costs $25; Watts Up, about $96.

The check

We used both watt meters to measure the electricity consumed daily by a refrigerator and a computer and compared their readouts with those from a calibrated watt meter in our labs.

Bottom line

Guess watt? Kill A Watt and Watts Up were accurate, and both can teach you how much an appliance contributes to utility costs. If that makes you use the appliance less or at lower-cost times of day (ask your utility when those are), you could save money. The devices can also help you compare energy costs of an appliance you own now with projected costs listed on any new one you might buy.

Read more