The green button

The White House effort to make energy usage data more transparent to end users has yielded first results. Along with other major California utility companies Pacific Gas and Electric has announced their support for the "Green Button". The initiative drives utility companies to offer energy usage data for homeowners in a standard format to download from their website at any time. Based on this format, other vendors such as Tendril or oPower can provide applications to monitor your energy usage realtime and take action directly from mobile devices at any time. This can lead to significant energy savings in a short amount of time.

If you have a smart meter installed at your home, try it out and see what unleashed data in standard formats can do. This is a great initiave by Aneesh Chopra, The United States CTO.