Google Earth Brings You Google PowerMeter

Google has developed a new tool that lets people see how much electricity they’re consuming. This of course will detail much more than your monthly electricity bill. It’s knowledge that they hope will incite many people to cut back on their power use, according to Forbes. A team of about 30 people from Google and Google Earth hoping to expand to more than 200 very shortly; is currently developing the software product. The Silicon Valley, California Web giant is partnering with a host of electric utilities, device makers, regulators and other tech companies to deliver the data to consumers.

“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” — Lord Kelvin

Forbes says utilities can’t currently get information about outages and power spikes, and most consumers have no idea how much it costs to use power at certain times of the day. Google’s new PowerMeter tool aims to fix all that. PowerMeter is a piece of software that allows people to view online how much electricity they’re using every time they plug in a device and leave it running for a certain period of time. As ever, Google doesn’t have any concrete plans on how to make money from PowerMeter, but Kristen Olsen Cahill, Google’s product manager with Google.org, suggests this is yet another product that will drive traffic to the company’s Web site. She added that if 5.3 million people used the new tool and cut back their electricity consumption by 10%, they would save enough to power a large city.