Energy efficiency

Microsoft is pulling the plug on its Hohm consumer energy management application because of poor uptake.

The move to discontinue Hohm, announced on the product's community blog today, comes less than a week after Google said it is axing PowerMeter, a similar energy monitoring product.

Microsoft said that Hohm received positive feedback but "due to the slow overall market adoption of the service," the company has decided to focus its environmental efforts elsewhere. In April, CNET reported that Microsoft was phasing out Hohm and would focus its development on electric vehicle charging through a partnership with Ford. … Read more

CALAIS, France--I'm sitting in a train doing something more than 265 million people have done before--enter the Chunnel for a crossing between France and England. But I've got a seat very few of them have ever had: in the cab, next to the driver of the train, and we're looking directly at the mouth of the world-famous tunnel.

This is a spot I didn't expect to ever be in, but I've come here as part of Road Trip 2011, and I'm getting a behind-the-scenes look at Eurotunnel, the under-the English Channel crossing, putting me … Read more

In the wake of Google's decision to retire its PowerMeter application, industry insiders showed little surprise. But the episode illustrates how the bar has been raised in the nascent home energy management area.

Google on Friday said that it decided to retire PowerMeter, a Web application that displays how much electricity a home is using. Company executives had hopes of expanding the product into a broad set of features, but customer uptake was not as strong as hoped, Google said in a company blog.

For the many smart-grid companies actively working in home energy management, Google's departure reflects how difficult it is to make money in the field of energy efficiency and control. From a product standpoint, the move is a reminder that simply surfacing energy data is not enough to get consumers en masse to care about energy.

"[PowerMeter] really suffered from a fundamental flaw in its operating assumption that people are interested in monitoring their energy usage at a 15-minute level of granularity, or in real time. They are not. People lead extremely busy lives and studying a line chart showing their hourly energy consumption is simply not going to make anyone's priority list," said Ogi Kavazovic, the vice president of marketing and strategy at Opower, a home energy efficiency company.

Dozens of companies have built applications or gadgets called in-home dashboards that show detailed electricity usage with the idea that more information will provide clues on how to conserve energy. For example, showing people that a pool pump is a big energy consumer could lead them to run it on a schedule rather than all the time.

What's more challenging, though, is motivating consumers to stick with energy-saving efforts, according to energy efficiency professionals. To reach a large number of users, information should be presented in a variety of channels--whether it's a Web portal, handheld device, e-mail, or paper--and focus on consumer behavior as much as the technology, they said.

Opower, now a well-recognized company in the field, made its mark with paper reports that show customers how efficient one home is compared to people in similar homes and communities. It focuses on simple presentation of information online and offline and the social psychology around efficiency. For example, its reports have a smiley face to indicate how well people are doing compared to peers on efficiency. … Read more

The case of the energy-hogging set-top boxes and DVRs highlights the challenges of changing existing industry and consumer practices to boost energy efficiency.

The New York Times yesterday ran an in-depth look at the issues surrounding set-top boxes and DVRs, which have become the biggest energy consumer in many homes. The National Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, published an analysis two weeks ago which found that set-top boxes consume more energy than the TVs they're connected to, and more than EnergyStar refrigerators. Because they're on all the time, they cost consumers $2 billion a year when … Read more

Google is pulling the plug on its PowerMeter electricity-monitoring tool due to poor uptake, a sign of how tough it is to make money in home energy software.

In a company blog today, Google said that PowerMeter and Google Health Web applications were trailblazers as products, but just didn't catch on as hoped.

"We're pleased that PowerMeter has helped demonstrate the importance of this access and created something of a model. However, our efforts have not scaled as quickly as we would like, so we are retiring the service," wrote Bill Weihl, Google Green Energy czar. The service will be suspended September 16, giving people time to export their data.

Google launched PowerMeter two years ago through its philanthropic arm as a Web application that can collect information from smart meters to show consumers detailed information on electricity use. With more detail, people can take steps to cut down on power.

As recently as April of this year, Weihl said in an interview that Google planned to keep developing and offering the product even though home electricity is a "complicated ecosystem." Google's former director of climate change initiatives, Dan Reicher, last year said that Google planned to add features, such as water and natural gas monitoring, as well as allowing consumers to tie into peak-power-shaving programs.

Google offered PowerMeter through utility partnerships and had made deals with electricity monitor device makers so that they could view real-time usage data from PowerMeter on a PC or smartphone.

But cracking beyond the group of energy-conscious consumers has proved elusive--and Google is not alone in that regard.

Microsoft earlier this year told CNET that it plans to refocus its Hohm residential energy management application onto electric-vehicle charging through a partnership with Ford. Hohm was similar to PowerMeter but provided specific recommendations on how to make a home more energy efficient.

At the same time, there are dozens of other companies, including many start-ups, hoping to build energy management systems to improve home energy control and efficiency. … Read more

Three years after launching Google Health, the company has decided to pull the plug on the ailing personal health records service. The lights are also going out for the Google PowerMeter service, which monitors Web-based home energy use.

The Google Health service will expire on January 1, 2012, but users will have until January 1, 2013, to transfer their data out of the system before it gets deleted entirely.

"Now, with a few years of experience, we've observed that Google Health is not having the broad impact that we hoped it would," Google said in a blog post today. &… Read more

General Electric and five venture capital companies today said they will invest $63 million in 10 green-tech start-ups working in home energy, bringing them both money and credibility.

GE will also give five $100,000 grants to less-developed companies creating products around household energy efficiency and solar power. The three areas of investment are solar, communications and software, and energy efficiency, said Ecomagination Challenge director Tore Land.

The funding is part of GE's $200 million Ecomagination Challenge program launched last year to solicit ideas to improve the electric grid. GE and its venture capital partners invested in smart-grid and … Read more

An oil drill in Mississippi is breaking new ground in waste heat, using unwanted water to run a generator that runs on waste heat.

ElectraTherm, which makes the waste heat generator, said the Denbury oil well near Laurel, Miss., has successfully installed its GreenMachine product and shown that it can provide 20 percent of the electric power needed for the drilling. The demonstration was funded by a $460,000 federal government grant, half of which was paid for by one of ElectraTherm's distributors.

Waste heat is considered a relatively untapped source of energy that could make many industrial processes, … Read more

PARIS--As he neared the end of the nearly 10-hour flight from Everett, Wash., to the French capital and the Paris Air Show here, Boeing chief pilot Mark Feuerstein got some unexpected gratification.

"It was a real quiet flight over," Feuerstein said of the trip that began just an hour north of Seattle, where Boeing builds many of its biggest passenger planes. "But as we approached Paris, it became a big deal. People knew who we were, on the radio. It was exciting. A lot of the pilots in the area saw us and were commenting, asking, 'Is … Read more