Sharing energy data

Photo from Russell Davies - "The lowest we can get the wattson to go"

A few coincidences triggered me to write this post.

Early last week I saw a link (via rodcorp I think) comparing four home energy monitors - devices that measure your electricity consumption and display it in the hope that it will make you more energy aware. What intrigued me was that all four of them are wireless, i.e. a sensor measures the current being drawn in the house and wirelessly communicates to a base unit, but none of them connects to the internet. Only one of them in fact, even connects to your computer; the rather expensive but smart Wattson from diykyoto, .

Later in the day I was at the Innovation Edge conference, put on by NESTA at the Royal Festival Hall. At lunchtime I had a wander round the stands and diykyoto were there showing off the Wattson. So I asked my question about connecting to the internet. The representative said that they are currently building a social networking site based around the product and people's energy consumption and that they have also made the decision to make the data accessible (as a CSV export initially, I think he said). So they're getting there, and I imagine adding in this kind of stuff is hard for a small company. Interestingly, the guy standing in front of me (sorry, didn't catch his name) was talking to them about Jane McGonigal and Amy-Jo Kim, two game researchers who advocate the power of games and fun in society, and whether they could develop gaming around decreasing energy consumption.

What I would like to see is for energy monitors like these to make the data easily accessible, preferably publishing the energy data straight to the web. And there should be open standards defining how that data is published and how it can be consumed. And then there could be aggregation sites for this data, energy widgets incorporated into social networking sites and games based on consumption. So people can see each others energy consumption, display their low energy badges with pride and compete with each other to get the lowest score. My old boss, Dan Hill, has written one of his usual comprehensive essays on this kind of thing over at City Of Sound; thinking around how this would work with cities and communities.

So does this exist already? Could we build it? I think we can see the beginnings of something at Pachube, a site for sharing real-time sensor data, and Usman Haque's EEML (Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML), a protocol for sensor data) but there can be so much more.

Anyway, I don't really want to buy an energy monitor until it can do all that. Am I missing anything? Has anyone managed to get data out of any of the other energy monitors?