The vision of the Green Button initiative, a recent White House effort to bring together the nation’s utilities, energy consumers and private industry to develop Internet and mobile phone-style technologies and business models aimed at reducing energy consumption, end goal is that everyone will be able to monitor and control their home energy usage, and lower their monthly utility bills, with a few swipes on a smartphone app.
California’s three major utilities – Pacific Gas and Electric, San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison became the first in the nation to announce they now support Green Button. Together the utilities serve about 10 million households.The companies have worked together to make this data available to homeowners.
Through its Green Button program, the government hopes to coax all utility companies across the country to collect and produce energy usage data for homeowners in a standard format they can download at any time from a utility’s Web site.
