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 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.

Updated at 8:52 a.m. PDT with analyst comment.

Verizon Communications is exploring ways to use its Fios broadband service to give consumers ways to remotely control their thermostat and view their energy usage.

Company engineers are now designing applications, including energy management, to work with the routers that come with its Fios service. Greentech Media reported Verizon's plans on Wednesday.

The first application Verizon expects to roll out will be videoconferencing by the end of the year, according to company spokesman Jim Smith, who said home security and energy management are also being considered.

"Home networks are the next frontier in telecom, and we want to be ready with helpful and valuable applications," he said.

Verizon can remotely update its routers, which are equipped with three Wi-Fi channels and wired Ethernet ports. That means that the router can be a central control point for managing home devices with an Internet Protocol address, Smith said.

For example, an IP-enabled thermostat could allow a person to change temperature settings from a mobile device or set up a schedule to control a window shade with a motor.

Conceivably, data from a so-called smart meter, which can communicate energy usage in near real time, could be gathered by Verizon routers so consumers can track their usage.

Google, which is testing a home energy management application called PowerMeter, said simply getting a handle on that data helps the typical consumer reduce energy consumption 5 percent to 15 percent.

At this point, most people expect utilities to spearhead home energy management offerings through their smart-grid programs. Smart-grid trials going on now typically provide consumers with detailed usage information and incentives to reduce their energy use during peak times.

But utilities are notoriously slow adopters of technology, unlike telecommunications companies. Meanwhile, some utilities are not active in smart-grid technology at all or are hesitant to invest in energy efficiency.

Smith said Verizon could sell energy management service directly to consumers or potentially partner with a local utility.

Jesse Berst, an analyst at GlobalSmartEnergy and founding editor Smart Grid News, said that telecommunications and energy firms will compete to reach consumers with energy-management services.

"There will be a huge collision in the home, but it won't just be utilities and telcos. Many others are converging there as well," he said.

Cisco Systems on Tuesday introduced software for controlling energy use in networked computing equipment as well as building heating and cooling systems.

Called EnergyWise, the software is a free upgrade to Cisco Catalyst switches that can monitor and manage how energy is used on IP-connected devices, including phones and wireless routers. This summer Cisco will release a version, based on Verdiem's Surveyor PC management software, that reduces energy levels of PCs.

With EnergyWise, a company can set policies on energy use, allowing PCs or networking equipment to go into sleep mode after work hours, for example.

(Credit: Cisco)

Cisco's longer-term plan is to get beyond tech gear and into building-automation systems.

Early next year, EnergyWise will be able to manage building assets, including heating, ventilation, air conditioning, lighting, and employee badge systems.

On Tuesday, Cisco said it bought a company called Richards-Zeta Building Intelligence that makes software that translates information from building equipment, such as heating and cooling systems, into a format that can be read by EnergyWise and other software applications.

Other large IT vendors, like IBM, are making similar efforts to manage both IT equipment and building management systems.

Cisco is also working with Schneider Electric to tie its building management system to the EnergyWise software. But William Choe, director of Cisco's Ethernet switching technology group, told Light Reading that many of the energy savings for companies will occur by installing the software on smaller routers in a business.

"The majority of these switches in this application are in the wiring closet, touching the endpoints--the APs (access points) and the IP phones," Choe said.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Power Assure was started a year ago by Donnie Foster and Clemens Pfeiffer, former Hewlett-Packard executives. For the last ten years, Pfeiffer--the CTO and brain behind Power Assure's patent pending Holistic Power Management technology--ran his own company, International SoftDevices, developing software for monitoring and restarting servers after they had failed.

Power Assure CTO Clemens Pfeiffer and CEO Donnie Foster

(Credit: Hanna Sistek)

"We realized one could use this to automate the switching on and off of servers, and we saw a business opportunity," recalled Pfeiffer, who is CTO of the start-up based here.

Power Assure's Holistic Power Management collects power usage data every minute from servers, as well as shifts in utilization and unexpected shifts in Internet traffic from applications. When the Internet traffic increases, more servers will be dynamically switched on, and vice versa.

Most server companies don't publish power-consumption information for servers when they are turned on, running at idle, or at full load. As a result, users don't know how much power they are really using anywhere in the data center, Pfeiffer said.

Today, a server uses 60 to 90 percent of the energy needed for maximum performance while in idle mode, said Pfeiffer. In spite of this, most data centers simply keep the servers running, so as to be sure to meet peak needs when these might occur. That means big energy losses.

Power Assure loads up individual servers in the cloud to 70 to 80 percent of their capacity, and dynamically switches on and off the idle systems. Customers can themselves decide how much excess capacity they want to have. A minimal buffer could save 80 percent of the energy consumption, according to the company. A more comfortable 25 percent buffer could still save around 70 percent of energy. To kick on 200,000 servers only takes five minutes, Foster says.

Power Assure's software also measures how much energy the cooling system utilizes. This is roughly equal to the consumption of the servers. Holistic Power Management can also regulate the cooling according to the amount of servers used. The only problem today is that a majority of data centers built prior to the green awakening lack variable cooling equipment capability.

What is unique for Power Assures' platform is that it works across all data centers with near real-time monitoring and management of power, cooling and IT, without heavy policy writing or management, Foster claimed.

Power Assure's Holistic Power Management, on screen

(Credit: Hanna Sistek)

Power Assure is all but alone in energy management. The energy bill has long troubled large players like IBM, VMWare, and Symantec. But Foster counters by pointing out that the solutions IBM develops are only applicable on IBM's own servers, which Scott Tease, manager for IBM's BladeCenter, confirmed. Power Assure's solution fits any system, Foster continued.

Other competitors are smaller companies like Cassatt, which recently launched a new update on its power saving software. The way Cassatt's system works is that customers themselves pre-set their own power-saving policies, which can be time-based (lower at night, for instance), event-based (how to respond to emergency situations), capacity-based (like network traffic) or demand-based. Customers can tailor their policies according to their different user groups.

"It gives our customers a broader variety of options to optimize how many servers are on and off," said Ken Oestreich, director of product management and marketing at Cassatt.

But Foster claims his Holistic Power Management is more user-friendly. "The customers have to implement Cassatt's technology themselves. Our customers only need to say what amount of buffer they want," he said.

Cassatt charges a one-time fee of $200 per server for its services. Power Assure asks for a monthly fee of one-third of the energy savings its clients make on reduced energy costs, which is the equivalent of roughly $9 per server and month.

Power Assure is still looking for venture capital funding, and needs to prove its technology on a larger scale. At the moment, it is doing initial trials at Facebook and Yahoo.

A problem Power Assure might face is that many companies hesitate to switch off their servers. "The cost-saving arithmetic is pretty appealing, but switching off servers is perceived as a risk. Otherwise this would be universal, but it's far from it at the moment," said analyst Chris Mines at Forrester Research.

But there are surely huge amounts of money and energy to be saved by improved datacenter utilization. A large server farm may typically spend $6 million yearly on electricity bills, according to Foster.

Related article: Data centers fail to become greener, studies say