Google retires PowerMeter, Microsoft drops Hohm: death of another great-green-hope?

I read with a tinge of sadness recently that Google has pulled its much-heralded PowerMeter home energy-monitoring product, followed swiftly by Microsoft, ever the competitor, deciding to kill off its own similar offer, the ‘Hohm’. Interest and take-up from the market simply wasn’t what both had expected.

At its launch 2 years ago, the Google PowerMeter felt like a potential game-changer. The idea behind home energy monitoring is to provide consumers with real-time feedback on usage, so they can manage and potentially reduce their consumption. Whilst Google’s certainly wasn’t the first smart energy product on the market, these have been around for a while (Owl, Onzo, Wattson, EnergySmart, etc.), it felt a bit different for two key reasons.

Firstly, the product centred around a software (rather than hardware) platform feeling less gadget-like, more seamless and easily accessible online (laptop, smartphone, tablet, etc.) to match everyday living patterns. Second, we are talking about Google (and Microsoft) throwing their financial and technological muscle behind this and they’re ‘Masters of the Universe’, right? They seem to succeed at everything, disrupt at will, and importantly, can manage end-to-end information so critical for this technology to succeed. There seemed hope for us all… so how could it fail?

Personally I have a soft spot for the whole idea of energy feedback. There was a period in my innovation consulting experience – chiefly with The Forum - when you couldn’t run a workshop without some energy monitoring or smart metering concepts coming out of it. So I was duly excited and optimistic when Google and Microsoft picked it up. At the time, the buzz around the technology bordered on the unrealistic, having an almost ‘space race’ feel to it. Our entire hopes to tackle the challenge of reducing domestic energy consumption seemed pinned on this single category. The problem is that these expectations are almost impossible for any technology to live up, and the PowerMeter and Hohm obviously haven’t. The deflating thing is, if Google or Microsoft can’t do it, who can?

It could be that this isolated example alone might not give the full picture of corporate leadership and innovation. Google for instance, in parallel to running the PowerMeter, has reduced the energy consumption of its data centres to half the industry average and invested $780 million in innovative clean energy generation through google.org, venturing and corporate investments, amongst other things. Maybe they realised there are ‘bigger bangs for their buck’ than this particular product category.

However, I do still fear for the home energy monitoring field and ask myself ‘does this signal the death of another such great-green-hope?’ One can only really guess why these examples didn’t work or what to do differently, but I’ll chip in my thoughts, in the hope it might help those who follow:

Too much faith in a techno-fix: Was home energy monitoring simply over-hyped through our almost blind faith in science and technology solving our environmental ills? In a nutshell, Google and Microsoft failed as they did not engage consumers with their products - whether through the interface, the experience or the marketing, yet in the end, that’s a people problem that has not techno-fix.

Creative destruction wins the day: Maybe home energy monitoring technology is disruptive for both the current energy AND the current technology sectors. Despite my earlier assumption that ICT players would ‘gatecrash’ the energy sector, in the way Google and Microsoft tried, it might be precisely the opposite – that a new entrant is poised to creatively destruct the ICT disruptors. The market-defining, home energy monitor of the future might be in development in the garage, or lab, of some budding entrepreneurial start-up in Silicon Roundabout as we speak.

Smart meters trump home energy monitors: Perhaps home energy monitoring is a dumb idea and smart metering is the way to go. Whilst still aimed to reduce household consumption, smart metering differs from energy monitoring as it is utilities managing and using information shifting responsibility from consumer to company. All this technology work on the premise that information = knowledge = empowerment = action i.e. reduced consumption, however consumers are widely acknowledged to be overloaded with information, messages, ads (its technically called semiotic pollution). What consumers really need is for someone to make energy reduction easy for them, to take problems out of their hands and do it for them.

Anyhow, whatever the reason we should lay a wreath at the alter of these products, offer a prayer that this doesn’t signal the death of home energy monitoring, and in parallel hope is we take a more balanced view and approach to these types of innovations in future.

Chris Sherwin is Sustainability Consultant at brand marketing and design consultancy Dragon Rouge and an Associate of Forum for the Future