TW: Following up on yesterday's post about improving society by filling in information gaps, here is news that Google is moving to expand its reach by creating a means by which to easily and cheaply track energy usage. Daily life is filled with inefficiencies simply because we cannot accurately and/or cost effectively track data. There is an old management axiom, "if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it". These type initiatives are the means by which societies grow their economies whilst working around resource constraints.
From Felix Salmon at Reuters:
"The behavioral sociology of measuring energy usage is simple: the more you know about how much energy you’re using, the less you use. Just getting the information cuts most people’s energy usage by somewhere between 5% and 15%, while people with high electricity bills (like me) find it much easier to isolate exactly what is causing those bills and can then work out how best to reduce them through upgrading appliances or replacing incandescent bulbs with CFLs or any number of other routes to energy efficiency.
The problem is in the measurement...Enter Google, which has now announced plans to release free PowerMeter software which will map any individual’s energy use on their phone, home computer, or iGoogle homepage. The little gizmo which plugs in to your fusebox is going to be very cheap, and with any luck will somehow be available for free to anybody who might have difficulty paying for it. (This is part of Google’s philanthropic google.org arm, after all.)
...I anticipate it’ll save me a few hundred dollars a year. His colleagues have already installed it — one of them discovered he was paying for all the washers and dryers in his building. When will I be able to get mine?"
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/05/05/awaiting-powermeter/
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