Google Sell PowerMeter to Obama

Yesterday Google and other members of The Climate Group sent an open letter to President Barack Obama urging him to:

Adopt the goal of giving every household and business access to timely, useful and actionable information on their energy use.

Studies and experience show that when people have access to direct feedback on their electricity use, they can achieve significant savings through simple behavioral changes. Investments in home energy efficiency, along with automating appliances and other devices, can lead to even greater savings.

Google have been working along these lines for some time with their PowerMeter project, which aims to provide:

A free energy monitoring tool that allows you to view your home's energy consumption from anywhere online.

Recently Google have added a "social" element to the project, by enabling you to share details of your personal energy consumption logged on Google's servers with "your friends, the Joneses".  Google assure their readers that:

All sharing is completely opt-in and your privacy will still be protected.

Whilst I am a firm believer in providing people with feedback on their personal energy consumption, I can't help thinking that many people won't be too wild about the idea of Google, let alone the Government, having access to vast amounts of data about their energy consuming habits.

Following on from their letter to Mr. Obama, Google and The Climate Group held an event on the topic in Washington DC today, which included a presentation by Carol Browner, the White House energy adviser. As well as their own blog, Google are using social media website Twitter to spread the word about the event.  According to comments on Twitter I'm not the only one concerned about smart grid privacy and security issues. Apparently Leslie Harris of the Center for Democracy and Technology thinks that:

There will be a consumer backlash to smart meters if consumers aren't in control of their energy data.

I wonder if Google or other members of The Climate Group are working on a means whereby people will be able to keep track of their personal energy consumption and expenditure in a user friendly way, but without Google and/or "the Joneses" being able to access it?