Using technology to hack into your energy usage

Darrell Anderson always knew that running a bath required more electricity and water than taking a shower, but he's an engineer at Google, so he decided to quantify that difference. His tool of choice? A new resource monitoring system designed by some ex-NASA engineers called Agilewaves with a price tag north of $10,000.

The company's high-end systems provide granular data on a home's electricity, water, and gas consumption, and can compute carbon dioxide emissions from that information. Their system, part of which you can see above, can hook up to 100 types of sensors, and even allows Anderson to measure the pull from individual circuits.

While the company's standard package provides visualization options, Anderson decided to take the analysis into this own hands, logging the raw data and running it through GoogleCharts. That let him see that 25 percent of his home's energy bill was going to watering the lawn. And he got to answer the bath question.

Now, Anderson can say with confidence, "Taking a bath is roughly three times as expensive as taking a shower."

Energy usage monitoring systems are growing in popularity, or least the number of businesses trying to sell them is. (Examples: Onzo, GE) The idea is that if a product makes invisible power usage visible, consumers will respond by reducing the amount of energy they consume. The energy savings immediately translate into money savings, and you help save the world while saving yourself cash.

Companies like FatSpaniel already have dozens of systems installed, but most of them are high-end set-ups geared towards dedicated environmental thinkers who have installed solar power systems. On a broader scale, the California utility PG&E has promised to install lower-resolution energy monitors called smart meters in all its customers homes, but that's not happening in all of its homes until 2011.

The latter initiative is important because energy solutions need to be within reach of mainstream consumers, "cost-competitive," as the industry lingo goes. After all, that's why Google's green initiative, RE < C, is dedicated to making renewable energy cost less than coal.

As the prices of energy monitors fall, more and more consumers will be able to know their own energy profiles as well as Anderson does, allowing them to reduce their energy consumption as painlessly as possible.