Russ Steele
I have written about the SmartMeters and monitoring in previous blog posts. It appears the only monitoring that people are really interested in is their monthly bills and they could care less about monitoring their power consumption every 15 minutes.
The Google blog has this PowerMeter announcement:
In the coming months, we’re going to retire two products that didn’t catch on the way we would have hoped, but did serve as influential models: Google Health (retiring January 1, 2012; data available for download through January 1, 2013) and Google PowerMeter (retiring September 16, 2011). Both were based on the idea that with more and better information, people can make smarter choices, whether in regard to managing personal health and wellness, or saving money and conserving energy at home. While they didn't scale as we had hoped, we believe they did highlight the importance of access to information in areas where it’s traditionally been difficult. More details here.
The real bottom line is discussed at C/Net News:
Google's departure is a "market correction," said OPower's Kavazovic who predicted that other companies with similar products or a direct-to-consumer strategies will struggle. Tech companies that work through utilities with an incentive to boost efficiency of their consumers have a better chance of succeeding, he said.
"It's unclear that consumers are willing to pay for energy monitoring products, and yet there are real costs in building and provisioning such products. Google found out that they would have to invest millions to make this work, and yet there was not clear ROI," he said.
Exit Question: Were you a Google Power Monitor user?
