After Google, Oracle, Accenture and several startups announced last year their development of Web applications or platforms to monitor household energy, IBM is announcing that they too want to help you monitor your energy.

Part of IBM Smarter Planet program, the project follows the Smarter Building initiative. The technology analyzes real-time electricity usage including individual appliances and reports it to consumers. Using IBM’s software, homeowners can view online information that displays their electricity use, figures out the cost, and compares it with usage by other people.

Even though the project is supposedly designed to help consumers make better decisions regarding their power needs, the study’s will definitely help researchers monitor people usage and measure their attitudes toward energy conservation. Through this project, IBM can really demonstrate the capacity of its database technology to handle lots of data.  In a simulation, they were able to get 3 million homes sending readings once a minute and capture nearly 50,000 readings per second.

How do you feel about software companies knowing your exact consumption of energy, down to each appliance?