Recently, some interesting concepts emerged about how consumers can save energy and carbon dioxide with tools on the web.

The basic idea is to gather data about your personal energy consumption and to draw conclusions from this.

WattzOn set up a database that covers the average energy needs of most things you will use or benefit from in your life for example. Users can help add more to the database or improve existing data.

If you answer a few questions about where you live, how you travel, which things you possess or what you eat, WattzOn will show you your overall energy consumption as well as your consumption by category. You can then compare your results with the average energy consumption of those in other countries or other WattzOn users.

WattzOn not only calculates the amount of energy needed to run your washing machine like most energy tools do; it also includes the energy needed to actually manufacture the washing machine.

In the end, you get a pretty good idea of how you can reduce your carbon footprint most effectively.

WattzOn recently announced their cooperation with Wesabe, the online money management tool. Wesabe recommends products to users based on their price and user satisfaction; WattzOn adds energy consumption.

German energy provider E.ON started a closed pilot project

to equip 10,000 households in Bavaria with an energy tracking device that sends energy consumption data to an online portal. The portal then tells you when and how much energy you consume, which will give you an idea what the biggest consumers are. Unfortunately this offer only applies for E.ON customers.

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Google announced to launch a very similar project (also still in closed beta) in cooperation with smart meter manufacturers. Google PowerMeter collects data from smart meters to show customers through an iGoogle widget when they spend how much energy.

Katie Fehrenbacher wrote a good article on Earth2Tech about the new market for saving energy.