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.
