Smart PowerMeter for efficient energy choices

New Delhi: Does your air conditioner consume more power than your cooler? Do you use electricity if you leave you charger in its socket overnight?

Residents of Mumbai, Delhi and Orissa will soon find out all they wanted to know about the power consumption in their homes – tracking it online right down to the last unit.

The tool for this would be the PowerMeter – an online service that global web giant Google is planning to launch worldwide to help people make smart choices about energy consumption.

The company recently announced that it has entered into a partnership with eight power utilities across the world – Reliance Energy being one of them – to launch the PowerMeter.

“Google PowerMeter can show people their electricity consumption on their home computer,” said a Google spokesperson.

“The software relies on smart meters as a data source. Over the past few months, we have been looking to partner with utilities that are installing this equipment in their customers’ homes.

"Our initial partners include utilities with millions of customers as well as smaller ones.”

In India, Reliance is already working on the smart meters.

A partnership with Reliance will allow Google to access consumption details of approximately 6.2 million users once smart meters become popular.

The story was originally published in The Indian Express.