At the tail end of last week, Google officially pulled the plug on PowerMeter, the web energy management tool that had been limping along since 2009. The problems? Lack of consumer interest and a dearth of utility partners. The latter makes complete sense when you consider profit motives; the former, though, indicates something more interesting: perhaps an industry being pitched to the wrong crowd.
Like smart grid, Google’s PowerMeter required utility company buy-in — or, in other words, an energy management tool aimed at reducing usage required the partnership of the folks selling the power in the first place. Spokesmen may argue otherwise, but the perversity of expecting power companies to help customers pay them less seems pretty obvious, and shifts the slow “progress” of smart grid and the failure of PowerMeter from “surprising” to “completely predictable.”
The mystery isn’t...
I handled a national media interview recently with something of a nervous nellie client (as she’d call herself); well-prepped for the session, she was still more than a little anxious. It mattered tremendously for her to come off as an articulate expert, no matter what curveball was thrown, and we had reason to believe that the journalist might lob a surprise or two.
