If you are an “ecogeek” like me you might have noticed all the products, services, and research that revolve around monitoring one’s power usage in real time.  Among the first commercially available products was the PowerCost Monitor from BlueLine Innovations.  NStar (the local power utility here in Boston) offered these little gadgets to a few hundred customers at a discount after conclusive research showed that personal power usage dropped about 5-15% when monitored in real time.

Real time means that when you turn off a light bulb you can see your KilloWattHour number drop within seconds, allowing you to understand in dollars and cents how much energy a typical 100 watt light bulb consumes.  This is a win-win situation for all- save money, save power and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This trend has continued to evolve and DIYers have joined in the fun.  Electronics designers have submitted two product ideas to the Core77 Greener Gadgets design competition.   The first was a Do-It-Yourself power monitoring device made from typical household products similar to the Kill-A-Watt from P3.

A year ago monitoring your power use in real time was a novel idea, now we need to take this information off the simple LCD display and feed it into the web.  Enter the Tweet-A-Watt by Limor Fried.  The Tweet-A-Watt basically takes the concept of real time power monitoring and offers the information to you and the public and is accessible from anywhere.

This concept offers the ability to feed this information into social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook. You could also be monitoring your power usage constantly through your smart phone (i.e. iPhone or Android), or crunching numbers and graphing through Google’s Power Meter.

I would really like to see this real time information offered via open standard protocols to inspire applications for all internet ready devices like the Chumby or iPhone.  Since Google seems to be the first large organization to aggregate this information, I am looking to Google to establish the standard.