According to Reuters Google is shortly to roll out free software which allows consumers to track their home electricity use and improve energy efficiency in a bid to help mitigate global warming.

Dan Reicher, Director for Climate Change and Energy Initiatives Google, is currently working with a number of major utilities companies in the United States, Europe and Asia to make this software available as soon as possible to the public. As part of its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Google said in February it would use its software skills for the program that will show home energy consumption in real time on a user’s computer or a telephone.

He also stated that this tool will be available soon and that it will be open source (and therefore free, but that’s nothing new for google tools)

During my research for other green tools and gadgets I found a very interesting Conference and Competition called “Greener Gadgets 2009“. They invited designers to explore the concept of “Greener Gadgets.” This competition aimed at generating outstanding design innovations for greener electronics. The top 50 entries were published online for voting and commenting, and from these the judges will picked the Top 10 to be judged live at the Greener Gadgets Conference in New York City on February 27th.

This years winner is the a so-called “Tweet-a-Watt“, which is a special power meter that uses  slightly modified “off-the-shelf hardware”, to “tweet” (publish wirelessly) the daily KWH consumed to the user’s Twitter account (Cumulative Killowatt-hours).

I recently heart that a cat twitters therefore I am not really surprised that a power meters starts to twitter now For those who have never heart about twitter, I would recommend to enjoy the video below: