Google may want to get a piece of the emerging smart grid market through its PowerMeter application, which lets residential and business customers view their energy usage over any web connection, but the web company says it wants to work cooperatively with utilities.
This assertion came from Ed Lu, Google's program manager for advanced products, when the moderator of the recent GreenBeat 2009 conference in San Mateo, Calif. Matt Marshall of VentureBeat, suggested that Google could eventually take over the utility's relationship with the end-user.
But after polling conference attendees on how much insight they had into their daily energy usage and if the utility should provide the information via a web-based portal, hardly anyone responded. "This is where we think we can help utilities with this particular problem," Lu said.
For more:
- New York Times' Green Inc. has this post
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