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WASHINGTON--Google's PowerMeter is really a straightforward application for monitoring home electricity at this point, but the organization expects to stretch its functions toward managing an array of energy loads in the house, according to an executive.

PowerMeter gets data from smart meters or house electricity monitors and displays that information on a PC or smartphone, which helps individuals much better realize electrical power usage and leads to clues on how to cut bills. But "we're just getting going" with PowerMeter, said Dan Reicher, director of climate change initiatives at Google, here at the Kema Utility of the Long term conference on Thursday.


"We're starting with electricity and we're interested in moving on to natural gas and other utilities [such as water] in the home," Reicher mentioned, speaking to utility business executives.

Asked afterward about timing, Reicher indicated that there are no immediate plans, but more sophisticated gas and water meters open up the possibility for Web-based monitoring.

Yahoo and google also sees PowerMeter like a way for individuals to manage when and how electricity gets used within the house.

Reicher mentioned that the application could be extended to let consumers take advantage of off-peak rates when using electricity-hungry devices such as appliances.

'Demand dispatch' for appliances and vehicles
On Thursday, Reicher said that Google engineers are doing study and development around what he called "demand dispatch," in which software program and the Internet could be used to lower electricity use within the home and supply services towards the grid now carried out by energy plants.

Specialized energy generators push more electricity into the grid to keep a balance of supply and demand or to maintain a steady frequency. The idea of need dispatch is that small reductions of electricity use across hundreds or a large number of homes can replace supplying more power to the grid.

Last year, Google engineer Alec Brooks first described experiments Yahoo and google has been doing close to demand dispatch utilizing its fleet of plug-in electric vehicles. The software Yahoo and google is working on is designed to slow the charge rate of electric car batteries as a way to curtail load temporarily and maintain grid frequency, he explained.

Yahoo and google sees demand dispatch, through which hundreds or thousands of load reductions are coordinated and communicated to grid operators, as something that may function with large electrical power users other than electric automobiles.

"It goes way beyond what's going on with a limited quantity of plug-in vehicles within the near long term," Reicher said following his talk. "It's dispatching all sorts of loads in people's homes."

For example, a individual could begin a dishwasher at 5:30 on a hot afternoon and have an option to operate it then or pay one-fifth the current rate to have it operate at 3 within the morning. Reicher said you will find a number of "simple loads" in the house that can be dispatched to the grid to cut peak-time electrical power usage, something that utilities and policymakers are interested in to prevent having to construct much more power plants.

PowerMeter could play a role in this demand dispatch scenario, although Google's work in this region is still within the R&D phase, Reicher mentioned. In March, Yahoo and google partnered with embedded chip developer Microchip, which mentioned it will use the PowerMeter API to make it easier to integrate products for example appliances.

"We're looking at it and we've done some experiments with other kinds of loads [than plug-in electric vehicles]," he mentioned. "Smartphones, smart vehicle, smart house--where a lot of those intersect, there's a lot of opportunities."

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