Solar Metering

A new trend for the energy industry is energy metering websites which provide details on the amount of energy generated by a power company’s various renewable energy facilities on a daily basis.

Companies like TEPCO in Japan are trying to prove their new found motivation to be green energy suppliers while other sites seek to aggregate the global wind generation data from multiple locations while other sites focus on regional wind capacity and daily generation data.

This is part of the promise of the smart meter phenomenon. Not only are we able to get real time data on our energy usage to help us and unscrupulous energy providers monitor our usage by the minute but we are also able to see just how much energy the same providers are claiming to produce at any given moment and some energy providers go so far as to provide charts for their solar and wind output.

By leveraging the raw data that is being provided by the various energy producing companies we can begin to get a realtime overview of the global energy consumption. Of course we cannot guarantee that the providers are going to tell us the truth about how much energy they are producing but we may be able to get an idea from the general public by allowing every household with a smart meter to provide details on their energy consumption to the global data pool. By providing realtime statistics on the global energy consumption and production worldwide we can begin to see the affects that various energy awareness campaigns would be having over the short and long term periods.

Providing realtime details could help us to finetune the consumption and also provide a meaningful metric to use against the most energy greedy regions of the world. It would effectively become a game to see which population centers can be the most efficient.