I hope this isn't going to distract him from more important matters, like making his planned movie of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves. A TV series adaption would be even better, The Expanse has shown there's a market for fairly hard sci-fi on TV.

For electricity consumption monitoring, I also vote for the CurrentCost.

It is quite cheap (30 UKP), and is a very geek-friendly product. It has the all important serial interface which sends out the data every 6 seconds, but it is a TTL-level interface, which gives purchasers the oportunity to exercise or develop their hardware skills, by constructing their own interface with the widely available MAX232 chip and a few capacitors. It also provides an oportunity to exercise software skills when parsing and displaying the XML data the port sends out.

It's almost as if the designers decided to provide an interface, but also wanted to provide a few challenges for users to solve.
Here are some more links from CurrentCost fans:
http://currentcost.wetpaint.com/?t=anon
http://www.sgurr.co.uk/lundycam/energy_monitor_interface.html