Big Companies Care About the Energy
Hohm is the new Microsoft service which will come as an answer to Google’s PowerMeter and all the other similar services.
Hohm is about ‘Bringing people together to save energy and money’. They are trying to give us a better understanding about our home energy usage and about what we can do to conserve energy and save money.
Besides real time monitoring of the energy consumption through smart meters, Hohm will also provide users with data about their energy consumption even if their utilities are not online yet. In order to obtain this data the user will have to answer a set of basic questions and Hohm will estimate their energy consumption. Through this Microsoft wants to make Hohm available to all users straight away.
From what I’ve seen so far they are really committed to this idea and even though the website is not yet up and running, you can find them on facebook. You can follow and interact with them on twitter or you can take their advice on how to save energy from their videos on youtube.
As I already mentioned, Google already released an energy monitoring system called PowerMeter, which is for now available only to a limited group of customers, but they plan to expand later this year. According to their announcement on the Google Blog: ‘Our software relies on “smart meters” (or other metering devices) as a data source. Over the past several months we’ve been looking to partner with utilities that are installing (or have already installed) this equipment in their customers’ homes.’ They truly believe that in order to create a path to Smarter Power it will take a lot of different groups working together.
In my opinion caring about the energy and our planet should be one of our priorities at the moment. The more big companies are concerned and are trying to find solutions to this problem the better. I don’t know if they are doing it for Marketing or because they really care but at least they are giving an example and are giving us a chance to become more aware about our impact on the planet: our home.
Let me know your thoughts and ideas about this and for the next few days lets take our first step into saving energy by turning off the lights every time we exit a room.
