Microsoft Announces Hohm, a Virtual Electric and Gas Meter
Microsoft has announced Hohm (Home + Ohm?) to compete with Google’s PowerMeter. Microsoft’s offering goes beyond Google’s by including all utilities, not just participating partners and by extending to natural gas. Neither are particularly useful yet for most retail consumers, but both are extremely significant precursors to profound changes in the way the electric utility business works. There are several important trends that these virtual meters signify.
The 100+ year old electromechanical meter is obsolete and on its way out. It was already gradually being replaced with electronic devices that allowed more accurate, speedier and less expensive automatic remote meter reading (AMR).
The days of the utility-owned electric meter are numbered. In competitive retail markets, there are already third party companies like energycomnetwork that do the meter reading and billing, and they sometimes actually own and maintain the meter. Eventually, consumers will own their own meters as part of on premises energy management systems (EMS).
One of the most important aspects of these virtual meters is providing consumers with more information about the sources, costs, quality, reliability and environmental impacts of the energy that they purchase as well as advice on how to begin to manage their energy consumption. In a Smart Grid world, Smart Meters will afford consumers a variety of options to manage their consumption to achieve their individual goals in these areas.
The AMR systems that many electric utilities have installed or are now installing are also obsolete. They are just an electronic means of the same old approach to metering and billing. They will be replaced with intelligent electronic devices that can not only meter and communicate, but also analyze and automatically manage energy consumption. Consumers simply do not have the expertise or ability to monitor, analyze and manage their energy consumption, and most don’t even want to.
With today’s ever more powerful electronics and ubiquitous broadband communications, an electric meter doesn’t need be located on the outside of the house for access by electric utility meter readers. In fact, it’s easy to imagine multiple intelligent electronic devices distributed through a home or business that meter and manage individual appliances. While the Internet refrigerator seemed like science fiction only a few years ago, and rather frivolous science fiction at that, the technology is readily available for every new appliance to have its own metering and energy management intelligence built in and ready to connect to the Internet.
The problem with these virtual meters today is that they are 21st century electronics, telecommunications and information technology tacked onto an electric grid that is still “your father’s Oldsmobile.”
Written by Steve Collier | Jun 25, 2009