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Google PowerMeter Project tracks your electricity-sucking ways
It's one thing to say that you're going green, but it's another thing entirely to live green. Google has something to make it easier for you; it just announced a project called PowerMeter that will help you cut down your home's power consumption.
The Google plan will use smart electricity meters to provide detailed information about your power usage throughout the day, so you can see in real time what happens when you leave the TV playing Animal Planet for Fido all day long. The SmartMeters are already being used by power utilities throughout the country and are expected to replace all conventional meters eventually. With the meters connected to the network, you'll be able to use a new application called Google PowerMeter so you can monitor your home's power consumption throughout the day, from wherever you are.
This is certainly more useful than staring at the power meter outside your house spin faster and faster when your air-conditioner kicks in.
After the jump, see how real Google employees are using it.
Google via Obsessable
By BoxerFanatic at 4:14 PM ON 02/10/09
Wait until the Obama SmartGrid project starts mandating this, and gains control over those devices, and the grid tells you when you get a forced brown-out.
All interesting until they use it to impinge your freedom.
By Lol at 4:49 PM ON 02/10/09
What a load of crap.
Nuclear produces tons of energy, the fuel CAN be recycled to burn 95% of it and most of the rest of the products are useful isotopes from reprocessing. The plants only cost a couple hundred million to build and take a couple of years. We've planned and abandoned enough plants to produce an energy budget an order of magnitude larger than the one we work w/ today.
Environmentalists protest every plant, no matter how safe (and they are very, very safe). Oil lobbyists and anyone else on wall street looking to keep the balance of power the same get the regulations and delays increased, and fund the protesters. They also fund leagues of lawyers whose only job is to keep the courts and the projects tied up with minor disputes and major suits.
By Lol at 4:54 PM ON 02/10/09
That's why it takes so long, and most of the cost of the plant is purely interest due to the amt of time it takes. That's why our society today is barely richer than it was thirty years ago which is part of the reason why the ambitious have siezed up so much of what little there is. We could be many times what we are and we don't do it out of fear. We could get off of coal, make public transportation so expensive that cars were more recreation than means of transportation, we could freaking cleanse the atmosphere of co2 if we really wanted to.
Instead we wallow in filth and destitution and talk about cutting even more of what little we have from the people's mouths so that the "environment" can feel better.
I've gotta assume some nation will go ahead and do their own thing and ramp up large scale nuclear. If they don't, though, we're doomed to stagnation and eventual death. And we deserve it.
By willie at 8:23 AM ON 02/17/09
Wow no wonder my power bill went way down when my last tenants left. SHE used to like to warm her clothes up and de-wrinkle them "every" morning... egads
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willie:
Wow no wonder my power bill went way down when my last tenants left. SHE used to like to warm her clothes up and de...More »