Good thoughts on APIs. Though I would love to pick my own energy monitoring app or device, so far utilities are keeping their systems pretty closed (it’s early still, mind you). Fortunately, companies like Google and Tendril seem willing to buck that trend (see: http://earth2tech.com/2009/02/11/how-googles-powermeter-will-affect-the-smart-meter-industry/).

Thanks for the clarification, by the way.

At the moment, the site is also missing data for the last 2 days for my address. PG&E could start by getting data reporting more reliable and timely, before making it more readily accessible to the customer.

On that note, the current focus for real-time feedback seems to be on in-home displays. This requires additional network connectivity between the meter ( typically outside the home and perhaps several floors away in high-rise buildings) and the in-home display. It would be much more interesting to start by throw the data APIs on the utility end open to 3rd party developers who could create all manners of web/mobile widgets where you could see your energy consumption from anywhere and on any device.

p.s Plotting tools do need to extrapolate when data samples are missing. I am not sure if the PG&E site always had this disclaimer but at the moment it is pretty clear what they do when data samples are missing:

“The data presented in this chart may slightly differ from the data reflected on your bill due to estimating, rounding and uncommon transactions.

PLEASE NOTE: On occasion, some hourly reads may not be available. If this occurs, usage for that period will be displayed as an average of usage between the hourly intervals where reads were available. Daily reads are used to ensure accuracy in both billing and for cumulative online display of energy usage.”