Toronto Hydro first Canadian utility to test-drive Google PowerMeter
About 10,000 Toronto Hydro customers already on smart meters will soon be moving to time-of-use pricing and the rest will be moving by the end of this year, so it makes sense that the utility give folks a way to actually see their electricity use. The company just announced this morning it will be testing out Google’s PowerMeter on select customers, making it the first Canadian utility to do so. If the trial is successful, Toronto Hydro said it may make the software available to all of its customer. Keep in mind the information provided through the Google PowerMeter won’t be granular — i.e., it won’t provide energy usage of individual appliances; just overall residential energy use.
NOTE: My story in the Toronto Star.
Tags: Google PowerMeter, smart meters, time-of-use, Toronto Hydro
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
May 23rd, 2009 at 11:05 am
I was thinking about this granularity thing. Would it be possible to use software to work out what a source of energy consumption is. The user would need to train it but i’d have thought that the majority of household items (especially the big ones like the fridge, TV, washing machine, oven etc) must have a fairly distinctive consumption pattern which the software could recognise.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Great Article, good blog!