Microsoft Hohm + Smart Meter = Energy Savings?

Posted on 25. Jun, 2009 by Ross in Energy News

Energy-Saving News has been quite critical of smart meters in recent weeks, seeing them as providing benefits to utility companies rather than consumers and expressing concern over how easy is it to understand smart meters and act effectively on the data.

Microsoft seems to think that it has the answer. In part of its continuing ‘Anything Google does, we’ll do too’ campaign, the software giant is launching its answer to Google Powermeter, titled Microsoft Hohm (as in an amalgamation of ‘Home’ and ‘Ohm’ - the unit of electrical resistance).

Whereas the initial emphasis of Google Powermeter has been to simply display data extracted from your smart meter and expect you to make your own decisions and tests from it, Hohm aims from the start to focus more on giving advice on home to reduce your energy bills. It takes the energy usage data and analyses it based on models licensed from the US Department of Energy and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which enable the programme to give advice on cutting bills.

Rather than interacting directly with a smart meter, Hohm instead will draw the energy data from utility company databases - at the moment data must be hand-fed into the programme by hand, which makes Powermeter much easier for customer use at the moment. However, its core design is to aid households to know how best to save energy, rather than simply display usage, which is more likely to reap dividends in the medium and long term.

Of course, both Hohm and Powermeter require users to take action. Getting energy usage from individual plugs and generating advice based on specific rather than generic information will be far more practical and useful, e.g. being told that your A-rated fridge actually takes 10% more energy than average, or that the lightbulb in the garage is using the most energy of all the property’s lighting.

Only once smart appliances and smart plugs become more widespread, and such software can communicate and control them directly, will households not only start saving energy and money but do so automatically. Technology which circumvents the human nature of apathy and inaction is the best way to fight climate change: for example, it is more effective to install intelligent lighting which senses occupancy and natural light and dims or turns off accordingly, rather than rely on people to turn the lights out after they leave.

Background image by mkosut @ Flickr