Green Tech

Microsoft opened up its Hohm Web application on Monday to U.S. users, a site that gives people a starting point for cutting home energy use.

The launch of Hohm, still in beta, was marred at least for some people, including me, by a DNS problem on Microsoft's side, according to the Hohm product development team. An hour or two after the launch, a few other consumers on Twitter complained of sign-in problems that lasted a few hours.

Once that glitch was cleared up, I was able to finish creating a profile in Hohm for my old New England house. Overall, I'd say it's a useful service that meets its goal of being easy to use.

The "brains" behind Hohm's energy-efficiency recommendations is an existing database that Microsoft licensed from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy. That means much of the basic information on how to save money on energy bills has been available for some time from the Energy Department and other sources, if in a disjointed and less attractive form.

(Credit: Screen capture by Martin LaMonica/CNET)

I was able to create a nearly complete profile because I've been chipping away at my home energy use for years. (How many of you know what your home's air leakage rate is?) I also did some on-the-spot estimating, which I would expect most people would need to do.

In fact, some of the questions are incredibly detailed, such as what's the capacity of your refrigerator expressed in cubic feet? Rather than pretend that I'd be able to find the manual, I went online and got an idea of what a fridge like mine typically holds.

There are also some places where inevitably there will be gaps and guesses. For instance, I have radiators so I couldn't say where my ducts are located (in conditioned space or not) and being very precise about say, programmable thermostat settings, can be tricky. Also, there are a lot of questions which will no doubt scare some people away.

That said, it's a worthwhile exercise to run through the roughly 200 questions, even if you can't answer them. Why? It offers strong clues as to what matters most when it comes to cutting your energy bills. Whether your PC and monitor uses power-management features is significant enough for Hohm to care.

Man versus machine
But on your first visit, it's really the energy report that you're after. Although Hohm's recommendations perplexed me a few times, on balance it provided solid information.

Put another way, I'd say Hohm echoed the advice of the three energy auditors who have traipsed through my house over the past few years. It also features a "library" with generic recommendations to help people get ready for the summer and there are tips sprinkled on the News section.

Not surprisingly, the recommendations are extremely unglamorous: replace (more) incandescent bulbs, insulate boiler pipes, lower the temperature on the water heater, and so on.

A few things threw me off. Get a high-efficiency boiler for $1,000? Not where I live. But when I clicked on that recommendation, Hohm notes that's the do-it-yourself price and offers a ballpark cost ($8,000) for a professional job.

Hohm doesn't quite measure up to a knowledgeable human being. I paid for an energy audit, complete with a blower door test, this past winter and the recommendations were specific to my situation and very detailed.

But that's OK. Most people just want some good ideas on greening their home and Hohm does that. What I like most is that it creates a list, from which you can develop a plan. Because let's face it, nobody's going to weatherize their home in one weekend.

Where to start? Hohm gives you a starting point for making a home energy-efficiency plan.

(Credit: Screen capture by Martin LaMonica/CNET)

How does this compare to Google's PowerMeter or other home energy-monitoring tools?

Monitoring products tend to focus on providing a real-time read-out of energy use. In its first beta version, Google's PowerMeter, for example, surfaces information on how much electricity individual appliances consume and provides daily charts.

Down the road, both Microsoft and Google are interested in expanding their products so consumers can participate in demand-response programs, where a utility can remotely adjust appliances to save energy during peak times. In the meantime, though, many smart-grid products are just trying to give consumers more detailed information than a monthly bill.

Because my utilities aren't providing a data feed to Microsoft, I wasn't able to view my electric and natural gas use without manually entering the data. If a feed were available, I think I would use it to get a better feel for seasonal changes and improvements I've made.

Actual consumption data would also create a far more accurate profile for my home, particularly when comparing to others. For example, I had solar panels installed on my house last year, which has slashed my overall consumption but that's not reflected in the model Hohm creates.

If there were a feature that I'd like to have, on first blush I'd say it's the ability to add my own items to the recommendations so I could treat Hohm like my to-do list.

The community site is bare bones at this point though I could see that being useful and fun. But in the meantime, it's nice to see that, according to my profile, I'm no slacker on cutting energy compared to my neighbors

Microsoft's move into the energy monitoring business may sound like a stretch, but to Craig Mundie, it's one of several natural new businesses for the software maker.

Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, said the company has its eye on any area that can be helped by technology and in which society is spending a lot of money and not seeing the return it would like.

Microsoft's Hohm service lets users enter information about their home and energy use to get tips on cutting their gas and electric bills.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Energy consumption specifically, and environmental issues more broadly, were natural areas for the company to delve into, he said, and follow Microsoft's moves into other thorny challenges such as education and health care. On Wednesday, Microsoft is officially announcing Hohm, a free service that households can use to monitor their household energy use and get tips on how they can cut their gas and electric bills.

Mundie said Microsoft started with the residential market because it accounts for $160 billion of the $365 billion that the U.S. spends on electricity use.

"The big industrial guys have already entered into special contracts," Mundie said, noting that businesses often have done energy audits and agreed to cut their use in exchange for lower rates. "To some extent, they don't need it so much."

Hohm, which was code-named Niagara, is the culmination of about two years of work in the area, Mundie said. It's also one of the first commercial services to launch running on Windows Azure, the cloud-based operating system that Microsoft introduced last year.

One of the big questions though, is whether the issue is that people don't know what is using energy in their home, or if they just don't care.

"I don't think anybody can tell," Mundie said. "So you give it a try."

But Gartner analyst Martin Reynolds notes that we have seen signs that apathy rather than ignorance may be the biggest hurdle when it comes to cutting energy consumption. Reynolds noted that even when gas prices tripled, most Americans opted to pay more rather than to dramatically change their energy use.

That same attitude will be a challenge in the home, Reynolds said, noting that he gets a chilly reception when he suggests a family member put on a sweater rather than turn on the heat.

For its part, Microsoft is betting there are enough people who are focused either on their energy consumption or their bills to make the investment pay off.

While the business model isn't totally clear, Mundie said there is potentially money to be made both from advertising as well as from connecting consumers to products and services that might cut their energy use.

There are other reasons Microsoft may be interested in energy, including the fact that its chief nemesis, Google, has also made a move in the arena.

The big difference in approach, Microsoft said, is that unlike services from other big companies and start-ups, Hohm works without needing any sort of special smart plugs or other gear, though it can work with such products as well.

"We didn't want to start with something predicated on some major infrastructural change," Mundie said. Microsoft is partnering with utilities so that consumers can get their energy use data directly imported into Hohm, but for those whose provider isn't one of the early partners, Mundie said consumers can enter information from their bill.

Hohm works by asking people a series of questions about their home and energy use. Consumers can enter as little as their zip code. But the more information a consumer gives, the more detailed the recommendations.

"You can answer one question or a hundred questions," Mundie said.

To hear more from Mundie, check out our video interview above.

Microsoft wants to show you how to cut your utility bills.

The software giant will enter the burgeoning business of home-energy management on Wednesday with Hohm, a free Web application designed to show consumers how to conserve electricity and natural gas. Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, Craig Mundie, is scheduled to introduce Hohm and discuss Microsoft's energy strategy at the Edison Electric Institute utility industry conference on Wednesday.

It's a move that stands to shake up home-energy monitoring, a business that dozens of start-ups and IT industry heavyweights, including Google, Cisco, and Verizon, are moving into. There are already several advice Web sites that help consumers get tips on how to save money by providing guidance on weatherizing a home, for example.

But Microsoft designed Hohm as a cloud-computing application--built on the Azure online operating system and Bing search engine--so that users can tap into back-end data analytics for more tailored advice. Hohm provides tips based on models licensed from the Department of Energy and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which were developed with years of data, according to Microsoft.

The Hohm residential energy management application gives consumers ways to track energy use at home and offers advice on cutting bills.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Another break from the rest of the pack is that Microsoft on Wednesday plans to make a software development kit available to utilities, which would allow a customer's bill information to be fed automatically into the application. Initially, most users need to input data manually, but over time, the company expects that many utilities will provide that service.

"It's analogous to financial applications when they were released years ago that interacted with banks' online applications," said Troy Batterberry, product unit manager for Hohm. "Now you'd be hard-pressed to find a bank that doesn't export data to Quicken or another common format. We see energy going the same route," said Batterberry.

The recommendations from Hohm should get better over time as more people use it, which will improve the underlying analytics, he said.

The first utilities to sign on to use Hohm are Puget Sound Energy, Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Seattle City Light, and Xcel Energy. Two smart-meter vendors--Itron and Landis+Gyr--are also partnering with Microsoft to provide more detailed information.

Business model of the future?
Microsoft has been developing a business around residential energy management for about two years and has been working on the Hohm application for about a year, Batterberry said. He anticipates that it will be in beta testing for about nine months.

Initially, the company plans to sell contextual ads to make some revenue. Down the road, however, Microsoft anticipates that it can become a sort of information broker between customers and utilities looking for ways to improve the efficiency of their customers.

Many utilities have energy-efficiency programs that offer customers discounts to upgrade home equipment, such as more efficient hot water heaters.

As part of their smart-grid programs, some utilities are also testing what are called demand-response programs where they can, with a customer's permission, temporarily turn down an air conditioner thermostat or turn off a hot water heater. This allows the utility to dial back the demand for energy during peak times in exchange for a credit of some sort to consumers.

In a few years, Microsoft expects to be able to aggregate information from several households willing to participate in efficiency programs to utilities. For example, this "demand-side management" service would tell utilities that they can expect a reduction of electricity use during peak times, explained Batterberry.

Personal information is secured by the same service used with Microsoft's HealthVault health care service. But Batterberry said that not everybody will want to cede control of its major appliances.

"Letting customers shed load is an interesting way to keep them in control of their energy usage, but there will be a significant class of consumer that will have issues with centralized control," he said.

Bringing scale home
In the near term, Microsoft expects it can help consumers even if they just want a better dashboard to view home energy usage.

Microsoft and other home energy monitoring companies plan to work with device manufacturers to get energy information from thermostats and "smart plugs." That would allow a person to attach a smart plug to a refrigerator or dishwasher to get usage information in real time to a home network or Web application. Over time, those appliances could be controlled to dial down usage during peak times.

Microsoft also hopes to have more vendors of smart meters, which have two-way communications built in, to support Hohm's data formats, Batterberry said.

Although there is plenty of available information for how to save energy at home, products that provide consumers more detailed usage information or automate tasks are relatively new. The business models to take advantage of efficiency programs in many cases are still under development as well. For example, a utility may prefer that consumers run dishwashers at off-peak times but people are more likely to do that if they can take advantage of cheaper electricity rates.

Microsoft, like Google and many other vendors, are betting that consumers will take a more active role in conserving energy at home. Tools like Hohm will allow them to have better information and take advantage of energy-efficiency programs already offered by utilities, Batterberry said.

"Customers are motivated to save money but one of the problems with this industry is just a lack of awareness," he said.