Blue Line, PlotWatt target Google, Microsoft home energy monitoring customers

Blue Line Innovations and PlotWatt are are partnering to target former Microsoft Hohm and Google PowerMeter customers. Blue Line Innovations, maker of the PowerCost Monitor, and PlotWatt, maker of the PlotWatt Energy Dashboard will seamlessly combining Blue Line's hardware with PlotWatt's cloud-based software, enabling homeowners to see both their real-time whole-home energy use and appliance level spending through live data feeds every 32 seconds.

PowerCost Monitor EnergyAxis Edition. Click here to view the full-size image.

"Now the consumer has tremendous visibility into how and where they are using electricity in the home. Not just how much or when, but specifically how much each appliance is using," Peter Porteous, CEO Blue Line Innovations Inc., told FierceEnergy.  "The game changing aspect is this is being accomplished without any additional hardware or the complexity of connecting a sensor to each appliance. For PowerCost Monitor users this is a free application.  For utilities supporting a consumer program we will also provide the utility with a free roll up of their customer base."

Utilities will understand in real time not only how much their customer base is consuming but on which appliances.

"The insight will be tremendous and it really opens the door for tremendous consumer education outreach and cloud driven demand response programs," Porteous said. "The CEO of one utility, when shown a sneak peek of the Blue Line PlotWatt solution, said, "we will know more about our customer in one week than we have been able to learn in 80 years."

Further, according to Porteous, the insight from real-time, whole-home data will reduce consumption. Porteous cites many studies that have demonstrated the power of real-time whole-home data to enable behavior change and reduce consumption by 5 to 15 percent.

"We believe the added visibility of appliance level data will yield significantly higher results," Porteous said.  "This data should also really help utilities better implement program changes such as time-of-use pricing."

 Even bigger opportunities exist for utilities.

"The utility no longer has to carry the load of demand reduction programs on their own. There are tremendous solutions and expertise now available to drive consumer engagement and change," Porteous said.  "Utilities don't need to build that expertise in house.  Instead, they can focus their efforts on building awareness and interest in credible and proven third-party partnerships."

Parks Associates projects that by 2015 while there will be approximately 48 million smart meters deployed in the United States, only 6 million of those meters will be openly broadcasting data. 

"The PowerCost Monitor allows 90 percent of all meters--old or smart--to broadcast data" Porteous said. "A fundamental issue around smart grid is consumer facing data access. This technology is a huge enabler. Better smarts plain and simple."

For more:
- see this release 

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