The latest to announce its demise is Google Powermeter. All the efforts to combine social networking with energy conservation seem to be pulling the plug. As I wrote back in April, Web 2.0 may be many things, but green it is not. And that’s a shame, because if our friends could “unlike” our energy habits, we might have some incentive to improve them.

To see what might be done to turn things around, I talked to Paul Cole, vice-president of Tendril, in April and again yesterday. Cole is a psychologist by training and has been conducting some pilot projects to see what might get people to save energy. “We have gotten it wrong so far” he says. “It’s less a question of user motivation than that we energy technologists haven’t gotten the right products to the consumers.”