Google PowerMeter

» see google.com/powermeter as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

This one needed my electricity company's cooperation, and my electricity company was never going to give it. That is the whole distance in one sentence. PowerMeter did not run on a website you signed up to. It ran on a live feed of your own household consumption, and the only two ways to get that feed were a utility that had agreed to publish your smart meter readings to Google, or a piece of hardware you bought and wired into your own breaker panel. The utilities that agreed were in California and in northern Europe. The meter in a Turkish apartment block in 2010 belonged to the distribution company and was read by a person with a clipboard.

The idea underneath it is old and sound. People who cannot see a number cannot manage it, and household electricity is invisible by design: a bill arrives monthly and gives one figure for a period already over. Google.org, the philanthropic arm, took the position that showing people the number as it happened would make them use less, which would cut emissions without asking anyone to sacrifice anything. It was never meant to make money.

Google announced it on 22 February 2009 and ran it internally with volunteers before opening it up. The public version arrived on 5 October 2009, and the important change that day was that you no longer needed a partner utility. If you bought a compatible device you could feed Google your own data and get your own graph. Two years later it was gone.

~ the case file ~

~ what it needed from you ~

The partner page is the best surviving record of what this actually took. The archived version from 2010 carries about twenty-five logos. Itron came aboard in May 2009 on the meter side. The device makers were mostly small outfits: The Energy Detective, whose TED 5000 sat in your breaker panel and read the main feed, and Current Cost with its clamp, next to names like eGauge and Wattvision that nobody outside the field had heard of. On the utility side there was TXU in Texas and San Diego Gas and Electric, Toronto Hydro further north, First Utility in Britain and Yello Strom in Germany.

That page is also the diagnosis. Twenty-five logos means twenty-five separate negotiations, most of them with a regulated monopoly in a different jurisdiction, and none of that scales the way software scales. Google is very good at products where the marginal user costs nothing. PowerMeter's marginal user cost either a signed agreement with a power company or a hundred dollars of hardware and an afternoon with the fuse box open. In 2010 an American household that had gone to that trouble was already unusual.

~ the same morning as google health ~

On 24 June 2011 Google published one post killing two products. Google Health went and PowerMeter went with it, and the sentence Google used covers both: the inability to scale had led it to focus its priorities elsewhere. The retirement date given for PowerMeter was 16 September 2011.

Reading those two names in one paragraph explains more than either does alone. Health wanted your medical records out of hospitals and PowerMeter wanted your consumption out of a utility, and in both cases Google was asking an entrenched institution to hand over a data stream it had no incentive to release. Google could build the interface in an afternoon. It could not make anybody hand over the data. Both products died of the same thing, which is why they died on the same morning.

~ who kept doing it ~

Microsoft had a near-identical product called Hohm, launched a few months after PowerMeter. It announced Hohm's end on 1 July 2011, one week after Google's post, and left the service running until 31 May 2012. Two of the largest software companies on earth tried consumer home-energy dashboards at the same time and both quit inside three years, which settles the question of whether the idea failed on execution.

What actually happened to the idea is that it stopped being a website and became a thermostat. Nest shipped later that same fall, and its bet was the opposite one: do not show the householder a graph and hope they act on it, just take the action yourself and mention it afterward. That won. The version of this that lives in houses today is a box on the wall that adjusts things without being asked, and a bill that has quietly gotten a little smaller. Nobody is looking at a line graph of their own kilowatt-hours. Google was right that the data was worth having and wrong about what people were going to do with it.

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