Felix Salmon

Kevin Drum is getting a bit ahead of himself, I fear, in his embrace of Google PowerMeter. He reproduces this chart, and says that the

PowerMeter app can be embedded on your iGoogle home page. Open it up and you can see exactly how much power you’re using every time you turn an appliance on or off. Neat.

In reality, however, we’re not remotely there yet. You see all those nice smooth lines and little wiggles in the Google chart? That’s not what you’re going to see when you combine PowerMeter with San Diego Gas & Electric’s smart meters. Instead, you’re going to see something much blockier: it’ll only show you total energy consumption on an hour-by-hour basis. So you’ll know how much energy use there was in the hour between 7am and 8am, say, but you won’t be able to see obvious spikes like the one for the dryer in the chart above.

And what’s more, if you turn on your dryer and then run to iGoogle to see what’s going on, you’ll see no change: the data on iGoogle will be for yesterday, not today.

More generally, the information you get from PowerMeter will be a subset, not a superset, of the information you can get directly from SDG&E. PowerMeter, at least in this case, is no more than an information delivery device: there’s no inside-the-home hardware involved, or anything like that. And if you get the information directly from SDG&E rather than from Google, you’ll be able to see not only how much electricity you’re using but also how much that electricity is costing you.

So the dream is great, and the reality is cool, but let’s not confuse the two.

Google PowerMeter announced its first partnerships today, with energy companies from Kentucky to Canada participating in the program. I spoke to Hal Snyder, who works for one of them, San Diego Gas & Electric, which has recently started installing what it calls “smart meters” in 1.4 million homes in southern California. It’s up to 10,000 now, hopes to get more than 200,000 by the end of the year, and have everybody installed by 2011.

Any of SDG&E’s customers can get their electricity-usage information from the utility’s own website, but now they’ll have the option of getting it straight from Google instead, embedding it on their iGoogle home page, that kind of thing. And the more they see how much energy they’re using, the less they’ll use — a 5%-10% reduction up-front, with more down the road when they start replacing appliances and light bulbs and the like.

None of this comes cheap: SDG&E is spending $500 million on this scheme, or about $350 per installed meter, but reckons it’s worth it in terms of hitting conservation goals, improving system reliability (they don’t need to wait for phone calls any more to know that power’s down in a certain area), and even obviating the need for new sources of power if and when variable pricing is introduced and moves consumption away from peak time and into the night time and evening.

The question is what happens for those of us who don’t have such an enlightened energy utility. Will we pay $350 to Google for a gizmo which does something similar? Since it’s Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the company, will they subsidize it somehow? Or should we just start lobbying our legislators to make smart metering happen nationwide? (I’m unclear on the degree to which such things are part of the stimulus plan.) In any event, the quicker this happens, and the more people that get this information, the better off we’ll all be.

John Kemp has a great column today on the politics of cap-and-trade in America. This is particularly interesting:

The White House included revenues from permit sales in its budget plan for symbolic reasons — to show it was committed to implementing cap-and-trade; it would spend the political capital needed to get legislation through Congress; to showcase the benefits auctions could bring; and to show how low-income groups could be protected against the impact of rising permit and energy prices by redistributing the proceeds.

But officials have been careful not to rely on the anticipated revenues too heavily. The president’s plan allocates the money to discrete tax breaks and research spending rather than general government revenues. If the permit revenues do not materialize, the tax breaks and research funding will be cancelled, and there will be no implications for the deficit.

The big picture here, in other words, is unchanged: you do what’s possible. A cap-and-trade bill is possible while a carbon-tax bill is not possible, so you do a cap-and-trade bill. A 100% auction cap-and-trade bill, as promised by Obama during the election campaign, is not possible, so you give away emissions permits at the beginning and then dial them back over as long as 10-15 years.

All of this is fine, as Kemp says, just so long as it’s automatic — ie, that Congress won’t have to vote again in order for the move to a 100% auction system to be completed. And just so long as the caps are inviolable, regardless of how many of the emissions permits are given away and how many are auctioned.

I’m cautiously optimistic that something can be cobbled together, and that it will create an infrastructure which can be fine-tuned in the future. But of course I’d be much happier if we could start with a 100% auction system on day one, as happened with RGGI. Obama has a strong mandate, it seems, but unfortunately it’s not that strong.

The behavioral sociology of measuring energy usage is simple: the more you know about how much energy you’re using, the less you use. Just getting the information cuts most people’s energy usage by somewhere between 5% and 15%, while people with high electricity bills (like me) find it much easier to isolate exactly what is causing those bills and can then work out how best to reduce them through upgrading appliances or replacing incandescent bulbs with CFLs or any number of other routes to energy efficiency.

The problem is in the measurement. There is a natty gadget known as the Wattson which measures home energy use, but it’s expensive, and almost impossible to find outside the UK, for some reason.

Enter Google, which has now announced plans to release free PowerMeter software which will map any individual’s energy use on their phone, home computer, or iGoogle homepage. The little gizmo which plugs in to your fusebox is going to be very cheap, and with any luck will somehow be available for free to anybody who might have difficulty paying for it. (This is part of Google’s philanthropic google.org arm, after all.)

Google’s Dan Reicher mentioned the PowerMeter on a panel at the New Yorker Summit today, and I can’t wait to get one — I anticipate it’ll save me a few hundred dollars a year. His colleagues have already installed it — one of them discovered he was paying for all the washers and dryers in his building. When will I be able to get mine?

Megan McArdle is unhappy with the state of green consumption:

When I look back at almost every “environmentally friendly” alternative product I’ve seen being widely touted as a cost-free way to lower our footprint, held back only by the indecent vermin at “industry” who don’t care about the environment, I notice a common theme: the replacement good has really really sucked compared to the old, inefficient version.

(Scare quotes Megan’s, natch.)

The problem, as Megan admits, is that she’s looking at the “cost-free” replacements: the bottom-of-the-line green products which can be used to replace legacy products which are the result of decades of development and economies of scale. It’s hardly surprising that these first- and second-generation products can’t compete on price.

But my feeling is not that the new products are too expensive, so much as that the old products are too cheap. That’s certainly the case with food: chicken, beef, and other corn byproducts — including the famous high-fructose corn syrup — are so underpriced that their cultivation is destroying the planet and causing mass obesity.

And more generally, the story of both Greenspan bubbles is that the Fed was happy to bring interest rates down to extremely low levels because of the massive amounts of disinflation being imported to the US by China (again, at huge environmental cost).

My hope is that the world which emerges from the present crisis will be one where goods, in general, have a price which is commensurate with their cost. I remember walking down Broadway last year, in Soho, and overhearing a woman coming out of H&M explaining to her friend that the clothes there were great: they were so cheap that you could wear them once and simply throw them away, without having to worry about how they stood up to washing or dry-cleaning. And although it was easy to conjure up lots of high moral dudgeon to direct at the woman in question, the fact is that incentives matter, and the prices at H&M were clearly incentivizing her to feel that way: as a general rule, it’s not good for the planet when a frock costs roughly the same as the cost of dry-cleaning it.

So it would be great to have some targeted inflation here: not just to help solve the housing mess, but also to bring the cost of many everyday products up to a point at which people become much more careful about using them — and much more inclined, too, to pick a green alternative.