Smart Home Energy Management... It's All About The Information.

Tom Raftery and James Governer of Greenmonk put together a Grid 2.0 Primer for Oreilly.com last year, which has resurfaced in anticipation of Raftery's presentation at the Oreilly E-tech conference next month. The presentation is notable for reasons big and small. It seems prescient, given Google's headline-crashing news of the past few months, that Raftery and Governer proposed a need for utilities to act more like internet companies - to adapt better models to move forward in the emerging energy world.  They also made stunning points about the state of our electric grid. Raftery asked viewers to consider that telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell wouldn't even recognize a smart phone if we put one in his hand, let alone know how to make it call another person. But electricity distribution inventor Thomas Edison would recognize our current grid in a flash. It's barely changed. Ouch. And good point.

Perhaps their most outrageous suggestion was an off-the-cuff remark from Governer that seems right on the money. It's this: TIVO could save the UK from peak usage brown outs. Apparently East-Enders is a very popular television program watched avidly throughout the country. Governer suggests that as the program ends, legions of Brits head to the loo, flush, and put the kettle on.  Spike. There was heresy to be found in the natural extension of this idea - (He actually says, "So let's not watch the Superbowl live..." Too far a stretch? OK, let's start with American Idol).

But there are two levels of sanity worth noting. The first is that much of our peak usage could be curtailed by changing our own behavior ever so slightly, or sprucing up the intelligence of our appliances so that they can do it on their own. Why not allow the drier to kick into action at 2am? Why not warm up the swimming pool during off peak hours and keep it insulated well enough to hold that heat throughout the day? This, of course, is the promise of smart metering--that the combination of an intelligent utility meter linked to appliances with brains will enable all manner of timing and efficiency control. (But, as we've been writing about repeatedly in the excitement over Google PowerMeter, we're impatient cusses, and don't want to wait for slow moving utilities to implement smartmetering). This leads to the second level of sanity, which is hardly news, but bears repeating: we can only modify our behavior and make sensible decisions if we have good data to base those behavioral changes upon.

Predictably enough, this brings us back to our oft repeated mantra--it all starts with measuring. Every home owner who possesses a whole-house electricity monitor knows exactly how much it costs to run the drier during peak usage times, and they simply don't do it. They can hear the sound of change rattling around in their pockets as a result. When we know what our actions cost - whether our concern is impact on the earth or the bottom line, we are half-way to the finish line. (And no one has to run a 100 yard return and get Oxygen on the sidelines). Until smart appliances can do the work for us, a whole house electricity monitor like TED, the energy detective provides all the information you'll need (minus the oil, gas, etc, but we're working on that). Start now. Your house is the first step.