GE Net Zero Energy Home Melds Appliances, Monitoring and Storage

General Electric appears ready to dive head-long into the field of residential energy efficiency.  Last week the company - which, either ironically or aptly, was founded by Thomas Edison, perfector of the now-notorious incandescent lightbulb and father of the modern electrical grid - announced a partnership with smart-grid startup Tendril, a partnership aimed at incorporating smart, automated appliances into the smartgrid.  The appliances, which would be connected to Zigbee wireless networks, could achieve up to 30% energy savings by communicating with one another to avoid peak usage.

What's more, the company announced on Tuesday that it would be developing its own home energy management software - entering the fray currently populated by Google and Microsoft - with the "Home Energy Manager" (a sobriquet curiously similar to the DOE's Home Energy Saver, a tool that has invited other notable imitators of late), aimed for release in 2010.  The Home Energy Manager would, like PowerMeter and Hohm, essentially be an energy dashboard - providing realtime energy data, peak usage information, price fluctuations, and opportunities for savings.

While news of GE's announcement has been somewhat muted compared to the pomp surrounding Google PowerMeter and Microsoft Hohm, GE's plans are noteworthy. The distinction between the proposed Home Energy Manager and other monitoring applications is that it would work collaboratively with smart appliances, energy management devices, and residential electricity generation and storage systems (with an emphasis on solar generation and storage).  This would amount, in total, to a truly smart home - dubbed the GE Net Zero Energy Home, which GE hopes will be a reality by 2015.  The Home Energy Manager, if all goes according to plan, will wind up being just a small piece of a large home energy pie.   From GE's press release:

As part of the company's ecomagination strategy, the GE Net Zero Energy Home offerings will be comprised of three major groups within the product portfolio: energy efficient products including appliance and lighting products that will reduce energy consumption in the home; energy management products that will enable consumers to manage their costs and energy consumption; and energy generation/storage products...
One new product that will give consumers more control will be available as early as 2010, when GE will introduce the Home Energy Manager, the central nervous system for the Net Zero Energy Home that will work in conjunction with all the other enabling technologies in the home to help homeowners optimize how they consume energy.   The Net Zero Energy Home announcement comes as a new GE/Ipsos poll [2] gauging existing U.S. and U.K. consumer awareness and comprehension of smart grid found that three out of five people in both countries would change their electricity consumption behavior around smart grid adoption...

Until the release of the GE Net Zero Energy Home, Home Energy Manager would, it seems, function much like Google's PowerMeter, and would, like PowerMeter, be dependent upon utilities to provide realtime electricity data. (GE and Google in February announced a partnership aimed at marrying Google information management with GE hardware - we'll see how that pans out with GE releasing their own software.)

GE's Net Zero Energy Home is an incredibly exciting prospect.  (A net-zero home is the holy grail: a house that produces at least as much energy as it consumes.) GE, with its extraordinary reach of products and expertise, is one of few players capable of making it a wholesale reality by offering a package comprised of everything from wind turbines to smart appliances to energy management software. For those who may have missed it, they recently invested in residential wind turbine leader, Southwest Windpower. Time will tell whether this level of integration will be the breakthrough move within the residential energy category, but I'm personally very bullish. And their corporate credibility could elevate the relatively obscure concept of zero energy homes into mainstream reality.

GE's announcement also highlights their commitment to residential energy storage - a field which until now has been largely overshadowed by developments in automobile batteries. Perhaps, with GE's involvement, the collective American bent toward practicality will begin to make gains on the collective American need for speed.

In the immediate future, however, we're happy to see GE offering its take on home energy management software.  But it does appear that the Home Energy Manager will, like Google PowerMeter and Microsoft Hohm, be dependent upon utilities for data.  As we wait (a bit impatiently, we confess) for GE's Net Zero Energy Home to make its debut, we relish their contribution to the rapidly growing field of home energy management, and hope that utilities will take note of that growth and the opportunities it presents.