A lot of green announcements have come down the wire this week, from IBM's "smart everything" to Cisco "EnergyWise" to Google's PowerMeter. With a number of emails questioning how the Google system works, I thought I'd explain it a bit.

First, a bit of background. Google.org is Google's philanthropic arm, focusing on innovations to make people's lives better. Energy reduction falls into this category; Google.org has invested in and supported numerous renewable energy initiatives and has funded Google's solar installation at their campus in Mountain View.

The Google PowerMeter ties into the new smart grid infrastructure proposed by President Obama and former Vice President Gore. Smart Grid is a project to replace all of the old, clunky meters on your home with new intelligent meters that provide information in real-time. Say goodbye to the meter readers trampling your lawn every month and hello to wireless and cellular communication directly from your meter to your utility (and hello to big brother).

While everyone agrees that the smart grid initiative will happen over the next few decades, when is always the question. Gore said at the Web 2.0 summit this year, we need "an ambitious clean-energy program (similar) to the Apollo Project to launch a successful moon landing in 10 years." The Apollo Alliance, for example, is one of several groups advocating an upgrade to the electricity distribution network and policy incentives to create jobs around clean-energy industries.

This is where the Google.org PowerMeter comes in -- when all these smart meters are finally deployed, Google has partnered with GE (one of a number of smart meter manufacturers) to provide the information to you in real time. Unfortunately, only about 200,000 customers have smart meters now, with GE looking to provide more than 25 million by 2015.

Furthermore, the information provided by the meters is no different than the information you have today. You can walk outside and look at your old mechanical meter, jotting down the readings periodically or even enter them into a spreadsheet (even a Google Spreadsheet!). The smart meters automate this "reading" process, but they don't provide any new information. For example, you don't know where the energy is consumed, and so a level of granularity is still missing. And even if you have the data, what do you do with it?

While I want to use something like the PowerMeter, I'm not holding my breath that my house will be part of the solution anytime soon.