Never were Lord Kelvin's wise words so rightfully invoked:
"If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it."
Keep in mind that, with the entire world pushing forward for electric vehicles, you can imagine what would happen if suddenly, millions of electric cards would be plugged in to the grid as millions of commuters arrived home each day.
With this powermeter tools, we may hope to have a bidirectional service, with our power provider automatically taking care of those issues for us, automatically triggering power intensive appliances according to their most efficient schedule-
At least, it will allow me to use their web services to log all my data, instead of relying on my own custom software to do it! :)
Strange, this what I've submitted to the Google contest 10 to the 100 on Sept 28, 2008.
ReplyDeleteI'm wondering if Google was not simply harvesting ideas via that contest, just to file patents ?
Your idea's name (maximum 50 characters):
Google Energy, how to be reduce your energy waste.
What one sentence best describes your idea? (maximum 150 characters)
Make people more aware of their electrical energy usage by displaying their energy
consumption on their Google account using $ or € instead of kW/h in order to reduce the global waste
Describe your idea in more depth. (maximum 300 words)
An energy meter with LAN connection (on board mini tcp/ip stack web server)
would daily send the energy consumption to the Google user account via the router.
Google would make the statistics available in $ (€) in real time so that the user would
become more conscious of his energy waste.
What problem or issue does your idea address? (maximum 150 words)
Electrical energy waste due to the absence of real time pertinent ($ waste) information to user.
(Counters are in kW/h-unknown unit for common users) in the house)
If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how? (maximum 150 words)
First benefit for our planet,
second for the user (invoice),
third for Google (hits, advertisement, paid links etc ..).
Google could make worldwide energy statistics.
What are the initial steps required to get this idea off the ground? (maximum 150 words)
Manufacture a low cost energy meter with LAN.mini web server integrated (ISO format) ...
The Goggle Energy Meter !
Then setup a web server for the data collection.
Describe the optimal outcome should your idea be selected and successfully implemented. How would you measure it? (maximum 150 words)
User, country, continent, world electrical energy (usage and reduction) statistics. (KPI = kWh)
User invoice (KPI =€/$)
Google income (hits, paid links, advertisement, games ..): KPI = $
Yeah, weird coincidence. But you have to consider this is "hot" topic right now, and this kind of thing has been "in the works" for several years many from other companies as well. Being from Google just makes it a bigger headline...
ReplyDeleteAnyway, you can try and contact them to see if they offer some explanation, considering your idea was so close to it.
I've written to Michael Terrel from Google who has filed comments from Google and related to that project to the PUBLIC UTILITIES COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA on Feb 9, 2009 only which looks also strange to me.
ReplyDeleteWe'll see....
Well... keep us posted of any developments.
ReplyDelete