Energy monitoring is dead, long live energy monitoring

Is it a bad omen for the home energy management sector that, within a span of just over a week, both Google and Microsoft have killed off their energy monitoring tools?

First, it was Google’s PowerMeter, heading for the virtual glue factory as of Sept. 16, 2011. And now Microsoft says it will lay to rest its Hohm service on May 31, 2012.

While feedback on the service from both customers and partners “remained encouraging throughout,” overall market adoption of the service was slow, explains a blog post on the Microsoft Hohm site. And so Hohm will go so the company can instead focus on “products and solutions more capable of supporting long-standing growth within this evolving market.”

Like Google’s announcement, Microsoft’s is filled with all the obligatory “energy-management-and-efficiency-is-good,” “exciting-times-ahead” and “technology-will-save-us” commentary. However, the decision to deep-six Hohm reflects what will prove to be the really tough part of moving toward a cleaner, more efficient and less wasteful energy future: getting people to change their habits for good.

As with a healthful diet and regular exercise, we know more thoughtful energy consumption is important … but all those (carbon-emissions)-fattening bad habits — cranking up the A/C rather than sweating a bit, washing half-loads of laundry during peak demand and buying ever-more electronic gadgets to plug in at home — are so hard to kick. Wait for skyrocketing energy prices to accomplish what PowerMeter and Hohm couldn’t.