I was struck this week by a huge rash of energy-related, venture funding deals in the last few weeks, all focused on some aspect smart metering or energy monitoring: Power Assure, Advanced Telemetry, CPower, eMeter, Hara, Control4, Tendril, EcoDog, and Optimum Energy (just to name a few).

There’s been a theme going around the clean technology investment area recently, with a lot of interest in both commercial and residential software and devices focused on helping consumers to monitor and see what their energy use is at any point in time (under the theory that consumers will be able to adjust their consumption patterns to reduce energy use/expense/etc.). Not all of the companies mentioned above, of course, are focused on residential energy usage (quite a few are in the commercial/industrial space), but the key idea with most of them is active management of energy use. Google even has its own effort in the area, Google PowerMeter–with the idea of wiring up all that data into interactive graphs accessible from your Google home page.

As someone with a reasonable interest in energy efficiency, and a technical background in electrical engineering, the only problem with a lot of this is: it’s all overkill.

It’s all well and good that people want to manage energy use and make more efficient use of power (in fact, it’s great)–but it seems like there’s so much focus on high tech software monitoring and extra equipment, wiring it to the Internet, etc.–that the simple, obvious things are being missed.

Earlier this year, I personally went through an energy audit of my own suburban residence, specifically on our electricity usage, with a less-than-$20-device I bought from Amazon.com (the Kill-A-Watt Electricity monitor). Basically, this device is plugged in between any device and your wall outlet (in essence, like a one outlet power strip) and lets you read out how much energy–in killowatts–your various electrical devices. Using the device, a spreadsheet, and walking around from room to room in my house I was able to figure out over the course of a few hours exactly how much energy our household was consuming. We added that to the power consumed on our various light fixtures (the wattage of each fixture/bulb, multiplied by how long those lights are on during a day/week/etc.) and you basically have the power consumption of your house. We cross checked that against our power bill, and it was pretty much spot on.

For our house, it was blindingly clear where the vast bulk of our energy usage was coming from: our refrigerator and freezer (45% of our use), plus during the summer, our air conditioning unit (which, when it’s on, pretty much dominates a vast percentage of our electricity use). Yes, lights were a piece of the consumption (17%, for us), as were all the various and sundry other “stuff” we had plugged into our outlets (computers, aquarium, TV, etc.). But, the key is: all of these are pretty much static. i.e. your fridge is going to be plugged in all day, and you’re not likely to be able to turn it on and off at will; your computer is going to be on when you’re using it, and the rest of the stuff isn’t adding up to all that much. Having a hour-by-hour, day-by-day reading of your energy use on your computer isn’t going to enable you to change your energy habits that much. Having that information is useful, but you really only need to do it once and/or when you’re plugging something in. Adding instrumentation into everything to make it energy readable at any point in time is not going to help all that much, because it’s going to be about the same from day to day, and the “big stuff” like your fridge isn’t going to change much (unless you completely replace it).

A one time examination of what you are using, in terms of energy, with a $20 device is more than enough to make huge changes in your overall energy consumption, without having to replace your outlets/smart meter things/load up software/etc. In our case, it was fairly straightforward to do the “simple stuff”–i.e. get rid of that energy hogging halogen lamp, replace all the lightbulbs with compact flourescents (and a few LEDs), unplug those couple of unused appliances — to shave a very significant amount of energy usage. It didn’t take fancy software or energy monitoring devices wired into the Internet, to get significant gains. Yes, there’s stuff we could do to even go further (i.e., upgrade to a more efficient refrigerator and dishwasher, etc.)–but that’s not something you’re changing every day.

I’m not against smart metering, or energy effiency (heck, we just installed a photovoltaic power system on our roof)  but it seems like something built for continuous monitoring (with attendant equipment upgrade costs across our entire energy infrastructure) is overkill for what, for most, is really a once (or once in awhile) activity. It seems–to me–the overall goal of energy efficiency might just be better served investing in helping people to actually do a simple, inexpensive energy audit, and make those small (but significant) changes to shave their energy usage.

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Clean Energy by Benjamin Kuo