The Brave New World

The Carbon Price has been announced. Everything since then is predictable – the wails of doom from the denialists and cynics, the shrill tones of outrage from the selfish and short-sighted, the promises of a bright future from the optimists and hopeful, the cries for more from the environmentalists and primitivists.

And the calls for calm from the realists. Climate change is happening (average global temperatures are now up nearly one degree Celsius), and the predicted severe weather events are more frequent. Climate change is caused by human activity – we continue to belch carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Australia is not “leading the world” in anything other than per capita emissions. And the tax will add less than 1% to prices, will cost the government money in the short term, and will reduce the profits of Australia’s top hundred companies by less than 3%.

It is an unfortunate fact of life that those adversely affected by change make a much greater noise than those who benefit. Their noise is even louder when it is encouraged by fear mongering from self-serving politicians (and yes, we’ll name names – Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey, Greg Hunt, Barnaby Joyce and more than a few others). They complain even more when their selfishness is abetted by ignorance and outright lies.

Connection Research is no fan of Julia Gillard and this government’s atrocious handling of the Climate Change debate. But the upshot is a much needed price on carbon – the main reason the planet finds itself in its current precarious state is the lack of any linkage between the damage caused by carbon emissions and the cost of repairing that damage.

It is likely the public debate will become even uglier, if that is possible. It is even more likely that it is already too late to do anything that will halt the planet overheating, with dire consequences.

But if we do not try we will stand condemned by history.

Powermeter and Hohm are no more

Google has pulled the plug on its PowerMeter residential energy management (REM) platform. A few days later, Microsoft – ever the copycat – did the same to its Hohm product.

These two initiatives never made any impact in Australia, but in the USA they were hailed as harbingers of things to come in this important space. Now they are no more. What went wrong?

The main reason is that it was simply too early. REM is a very immature market, with very few users. Indeed, very few consumers are even aware of the concept. Connection Research believes this will be an enormous market in coming years, but as our 2010 report on the subject (Residential Energy Management in Australia) found, there is currently very little interest in or knowledge of the subject.

Google’s PowerMeter and Microsoft’s Hohm, while good ideas, also didn’t really measure up technically. They didn’t report on appliances individually, the data was not in real time, and they did not stand alone – they relied on alliances with utility companies. Only one such company used PowerMeter on any sort of scale at all – San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E), which had a large scale trial with 11,000 users. Microsoft had a few pilots, mostly with utilities in its local Seattle area, but they never achieved critical mass.

Many SDG&E customers complained about the inaccuracy of data available on PowerMeter, and their inability to use it in any practical way. Here’s some comments from SDG&E customer “Susan C”, on GigaOm’s Cleantech blog:

“It was generally very inaccurate with frequent gaps in data and large errors compared to the actual bills. It did not reflect SDG&E’s complicated tiered billing structures and had no proactive notification mechanism so consumers had no idea how much they were spending or how to avoid advancing to higher billing tiers. Finally, it had no way of letting users know what was causing spikes in usage because it only monitored the whole home. Going out of one’s way to access old, inaccurate, incomplete energy usage data was a complete waste of time.”

Which is not to say it didn’t have promise. It is in the nature of new technologies that some variants of it fail. Often this because they are technically not up to scratch, but more often it is because the business model doesn’t work. In PowerMeter’s case, and in Hohm’s case, both were a problem.

Google and Microsoft’s withdrawal from the market does not indicate any problems with REM as a concept. It is simply a minor stumble for a technology which will become all pervasive within a few years.