[LINK] googling your power use/smart street lights

[Jan Whitaker]

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/googling-your-home-electricity-usage/

Googling Your Home Electricity Usage

By <http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/author/miguel-helft/>Miguel Helft

If people knew how much electricity they were using every time they 
turned on the lights, fired up the oven or lowered the thermostat on 
their air-conditioner, they would make smarter decisions about their 
energy use, and presumably, conserve more.

That's the idea behind a prototype service that Google 
<http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/power-to-people.html>unveiled 
Tuesday, which my colleague Matthew Wald and I wrote about 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/technology/companies/10grid.html>in 
Tuesday's paper. The service, which will be called Google PowerMeter, 
will allow users to measure their energy use in real time. It one of 
many new consumer products that would be enabled by "smart grid" 
technologies, and it is one of Google's many 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/technology/internet/28google.html>initiatives 
in the energy area.
[snip]
Has an interesting graph of the effect of monitoring. Information is 
power, so to speak.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/smart-streetlights-hit-the-streets/

How do you get 100 lighting industry executives to ooh and aah when 
they look at a streetlight?

Apparently, by turning it on and off using a cellphone.

That's what a Pacific Gas and Electric employee did in the streets of 
San Francisco last Tuesday night, much to the delight of the crowd 
who had trekked over from a Department of Energy conference on LED 
lighting a few blocks away.
[snip]

Jan
PS: Firefox problem solved. Thanks, David L.



Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com
personal: http://www.janwhitaker.com/personal/
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

Writing Lesson #54:
Learn to love revision. Think of it as polishing the silver for 
guests. - JW, May, 2007
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