A little knowledge is a wonderful thing

Jens Redmer explains how Google aims to help safeguard our energy future by giving consumers greater access to information about their power usage.

“There could be an immense value to utilities working with us and enabling their users to get more value from their individual energy consumption”

What has Google got to do with energy? You may well ask, but to Jens Redmer, responsible for the search engine giant's new business development in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the answer is simple: it revolves around the commodity that Google was built on: information.

"It's a project that was initiated in our Google.org project group, which is the philanthropic arm of Google," he explains.  "It's called PowerMeter, and it's our effort to empower users to get access to information about their individual power consumption, energy consumption and energy behavior.

"We've found that the average consumer does not feel informed about their energy consumption. Many people don't even know what a kilowatt hour is, let alone how that translates to a dollar figure. So we have some created some pilot agreements with a number of utility companies and device manufacturers to allow users to see a small application on their Google home page through which they can track what their home is actually using in energy."

Redmer cites various studies that have shown that the average user, even with only a few behavioral changes, can make substantial savings simply by being exposed to what they consume and how they consume every day. He rightly underlines that this can help conserve energy, cut down on CO₂ emissions, and ultimately help achieve Google's own goal, which is to organise the world's information.

Which is all very well, but what's in it for the utility companies? If greater access to information allows customers to become more energy savvy and cut down their consumption - by some estimates by between five and 15 percent, won't this negatively impact on their business?

Redmer disagrees. "I think the main benefit for utility companies that work with us on this particular project is that they can engage much, much deeper and more frequently than they typically engage with a consumer today. If you take an average utility, it may have a website, it may have an account system so that the average user can log into their price plan to see their billing information and their consumption online.

"The average user is very unlikely to go back to that website every day or even every month. With the application we've created being completely integrated into your Google homepage, you can expose that same user to the utility's brand name, to the utility's website and also to the user's energy information every single day, and eventually multiple times a day because the average user goes to Google multiple times a day.

"If the utility also has the ability to broadcast messages right into this gadget, right in front of the eye of their individual consumer, that creates a marketing opportunity and a customer engagement opportunity that today it doesn't have. So we can make the user happier because they're more engaged with their energy consumption and we can take the utility back to the consumer multiple times a day.

"We believe that this is a great value to the utility. And obviously, there's a general trend that end-users are becoming much more aware of energy consumption, CO₂ emissions and all these topics that you hear in about in the media every day, and we clearly want to create our services to feed into this development."

Partnerships

In the US, Google has signed on smart meter manufacturer Itron and eight utilities to offer the PowerMeter web service for monitoring home energy use. Redmer explains that it has plans to expand the service into Europe, and recently launched its first global partnerships. "We are enaged in ongoing talks and negotiations with a large number of utilities worldwide, including in Europe," he says. "There's an incredible amount of interest from utilities to work with this project."

Redmer points out that prior to these external pilots, Google had also performed some internal pilots: a few dozen Google employees were switched on to a PowerMeter application, and a smart meter was installed in each of their homes, which has occasionally led to some interesting stories: "One employee found that her base consumption had increased substantially one morning," Redmer recounts. "She saw that on her iGoogle page in the morning when she came to the office, and she got worried.

"She didn't know where those extra watts had come from, and she got concerned. She called her neighbor, and her neighbor opened the door and found her toaster smoldering in the kitchen. The toaster was stuck and therefore causing a lot of energy to be wasted. Her story is, 'PowerMeter saved my apartment.' Of course, this is not going to happen every day, hopefully. There are different anecdotes from all of these testers."

Redmer also gives the example of the smart meter in his own home, which he installed a few months ago. He discovered that his base consumption was at 500 watts, which translates to around €600 or €700 a year. After investigating, he found that the extra energy was being consumed by his hi-fi being left on.

"My TV doesn't have speakers, so I have to connect it to my hi-fi. I'm a lazy person, so I leave my hi-fi on after I switch off my TV. It only consumes 80 watts, but 80 watts times 24 hours times 365 days is a lot of money. I calculated it was something between €80 and €100 that I wasted just by being lazy.

"Only this small behavioral change that doesn't cost any life quality or any level of comfort can save me €100, and I found a couple of other things in my apartment that I could just switch off or stop doing, or start doing. I'm pretty confident that I can be well above the 15 percent energy savings that many studies show the average user can make once they're exposed to their energy consumption.

"That's a common denominator that we found through all the testers internally so far. It's probably going to take a while until we find out what the external consumers from our utility partners will say, but I'm pretty sure the results will be much the same."

Redmer points out that what makes Google the ideal platform for this type of application is its existing customer base. "If you take into account just how much reach Google has­ - 20 percent of the US traffic comes from an iGoogle page. That's an enormous amount of people who use our services, and if we can only get a fraction of those users on such services as energy consumption feedback, we can have a massive impact on CO₂ emissions worldwide. And that's also part of our goal for this service."

Technology

The rapid rise of smart networking and meters has raised the question of how the utilities industry can make better use of ICT. Surely Google, of all companies, must be well-placed to help the energy sector in its technology drive.

"We are not really in the smart grid business," Redmer points out. "We're good at organising data and working with data. So it's very unlikely that there will be a Google smart meter or that there will be a Google device that you can plug onto your living room wall.

"What's more likely is that there will be additional features added to services like Google PowerMeter, so that you can for example communicate with your neighbors, or compare your individual energy consumption to homes that are of a similar size to yours.

"We can help utilities by adding value where they have to present the information that is created from and measured by smart meters, by displaying it and visualising it to the end-user. Many utilities we have been talking to tell us that they feel forced by regulatory frameworks to deploy and install physical display devices in the end-user's home, which is a big cost factor.

"If you could envision web services for those users who may not want a physical device, that's also a great help for utilities because they can rely on service companies that can visualise these services. This is where we could potentially help utilities. It's not a binary decision, so it's not that you display only through Google. The Google PowerMeter solution could be an add-on to existing display and visualisation tools. There could be an immense value to utilities working with us and enabling their users to get more value from their individual energy consumption."

PowerMeter is not Google's only foray into the future of energy efficiency. The company  has also invested US$45 million in green energy companies, including startups and concentrating solar power, capturing energy from high-altitude wind and enhanced geothermal systems.

With its multiple data centers around the world, Google itself is a high energy consumer. Redmer points to this fact as inspiration for the company's interest in conserving energy to save money, and in green technology, the green subject in general being one of the key aspects of Google's operations.

"We want to be a green company," he says. "We actually are a green company. Our data centers are among the most efficient data centers in terms of energy consumption per computer. Those are things that we want to drive forward, so all these investments, all these pilots, all these projects where we invest and explore new areas of green technology - directly or indirectly - also benefit us as a company."

When asked what advice he would give to other companies contemplating a similar green path, Redmer cites the fact that the company operates with a lot of open standards. "We love open standards," he says. "We love to set up and create a platform that other developers and other users can use to generate new services, to create entirely new business models that may be reliant on some of our services.

"Take Google Maps, for example. Google Maps is a fantastic product for the end-user, but it's also a great product for business-to-business consumers. Many business enterprises mesh up data from their own databases with Google Maps. Some companies use it for their backend systems to dispatch large fleets of cars, or to get store finders on their websites.

"We created a platform, a model where a basic set of information and services are offered, and then other parties can add on their bits and pieces, their parts of the development, to create even more compelling features and applications for their individual target user groups."

Jens Redmer is responsible for new business development for Google's efforts in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, working with Google products and engineering teams on incubation exploratory efforts, technology and metadata licensing, strategic partners, urgent special projects and alternative distribution for existing and new business initiatives.