Apartment dwellers are the bane of utility companies. When someone moves out, the account has to be closed and the meter turned off. When a new tenant moves in, someone has to drive out with a truck and flip it on again.
”You have to write the ticket and dispatch someone to physically turn it on,” says Brian Alford, director of public affairs at OG&E Electric Services in Oklahoma.
The Internet could offer a solution. In a trial with Silver Spring Networks begun last October with 6,600 apartments in Oklahoma City, OG&E has managed to cut down the time required to cycle an account to around 10 seconds.
Basically, instead of sending out a truck, someone flips a switch in the central office to activate or shut down a smart meter installed at the apartment. The order is carried across the Internet via IP-based hardware and software created by Silver Spring.
A very small number of the homes were outfitted with meters sporting software from Greenbox, a startup formed by some of the people credited with creating the Web Flash technology. Peter Santangeli, one of Greenbox’s founders, says he brings a competitive, video-game mentality to home meter reading.
Power outages can also be identified in seconds through an automated signal from the network. Currently, utilities generally don’t know about power outages until they get calls from irate customers sitting in the dark.
In the future, these kinds of measurable results will become one of the principle drivers for so-called smart grid technologies. Although utilities have to install circuit boards and/or new meters to start managing accounts remotely, new equipment should be a lot cheaper in the long run than sending out people with trucks, particularly in high-turnover areas.
Indeed, over time, you’ll probably see a migration of familiar names in the IT world launching plans to take on smart grid outfits like Silver Spring and rival Trilliant.
The region where OG&E conducted its trial gets 10,000 service calls a year, an unusually high number. “The time savings are huge,” says Alford.
OG&E also installed digital thermostats and screens inside the homes of the test group to see whether they would control electricity consumption if given information about how much power they were using and what it cost at particular times. As in other trials, OG&E found that it did work. Retirees and elderly customers were particularly interested to see how much power they were consuming and how much they spent. Consumers could also select default settings (e.g., the meter would throttle back their thermostat if the price of power passed a certain threshold).
“There is price elasticity for electricity. If you send people information, they will act on it,” says Eric Dresselhuys, vice president and co-founder of Silver Spring.
OG&E is applying with the local regulatory board to conduct a wider trial.
Results from broader tests should be available later this year. Pacific Gas & Electric currently is installing “hundreds of thousands” of Silver Spring meters a month, says Dresselhuys.
Southern California Edison, Xcel Energy in Colorado, and Duke Energy have also launched fairly ambitious smart grid trials.
— Michael Kanellos is the Editor in Chief at Greentech Media, where he covers emerging technologies and companies in the green world.
Oh no! Now I will have to worry about security and virus protection for my fridge, my dishwasher and my oven!
On the flip side of that sarcasm, imagine scheduling your oven to pre-heat as you leave the office. Imagine having the washing machine kick off in the early AM hours when less electricity is used.
There is a whole world of possiblity and unfortunately a whole world of hackers waiting to take advantage as well.
Unfortunately I seem incapable of passing on that "old trick of looking if the lights are on" to my kids.
All joking aside, your note made me realize how many more appliances stay on compared to when I was a kid
PCs left on
Routers and hubs left on
Cable boxes and TIVO or DVR left on
VCRs, VHRs
As a kid if I left the room and the TV was left on there was screaming! Today you even have coffee makers on timers. I remember the earliest plug-in coffee makers and my parents wouldn't leave the house or even go upstairs if the coffee maker was still plugged in.
The times are a changing - and they are consuming more power!
Oh, nice! I'm starting to think that Google is following IE and everything we talk about.
Thanks for the issues you pointed out, it could also be used to see if there are people home (based on low consumption) - although the old trick of looking if the lights are on might still work.
Google has announced its plan to help consumers gain better information about their personal electricity usage. The plan, which is listed on Google’s non-profit website,
promotes the adoption of smart electricity meters in homes across the
world.
I wonder if the distribution power (pun intended) of Google can help bring this issue to the forefront of more people's minds. Goofgle has explored Google Health - but that has lots of pluses AND minuses. Without the privacy issues in the power realm, I hope that the this approach can grow and help out or over-use of electricity.
In some ways, most of the risks aren't all that different than cable or a phone--the usage patterns on power could be used to get more personal information out of the connection--including what kind of devices or capabilities a given home might have that could make that home a target for crime. Something along the line of out of this cluster of homes making up a neighborhood, three of them are actively shifting power consumption to lowest rate times and have high end appliances, computers, entertainment products, a hybrid or electric vehicle in the garage, or some such thing.
Ownership of usage data has in the past been the domain of the utility provider, and is limited today. As the amount of data, and the richness of the data grows as smart devices are added, the protection of the data becomes a larger and larger issue. Look how well we safeguard credit informaton today, for instance. Risk management will need to play into the systems design in this space.
The ability to take advantage of some of the full features that a smart home coupled to a smart grid could offer wouldn't necessarily be available universally. Advantages from the use of new technology generally come to those able to afford the technology first. Certainly the advantages at the provider side in reduced costs are there with just smart interconnects/meters.
Co-generation is an option that certainly is not open to all, either. Limitations from space requirements, land-use planning, building codes, safety concerns, and reduced revenue to the utility provider can all have an effect on the acceptance and ability to implement a co-generation facility.
Costs for the upgrade to the infrastructure are still prohibitably high. There are options for helping offset these costs, whether they are available to homeowners or utilities, or for that matter companies, is a matter for public debate.
These are just a few of the issues that would likely need to be addressed.
I think no one can disagree about the advantages for the user, but what do you think are the disadvantages? or the security, privacy, public policy, and societal issues with this? how is it different from a phone or cable?
I’ve always speculated that the development of the so-called “smart house” was retarded by the inefficiency inherent in the grid today. Smart grid technology—especially of the two-way variety can enable a whole multitude of efficiency initiatives in the place where we consume most of the resources that we as a nation, and speaking globally, as a world devour.
As we couple the capabilities of a smart grid to provide real-time cost information to a smart house, the house and the grid could collaborate to even out utilization peaks and valleys, ultimately driving down the need for more capacity in the grid. Extend this to the concept of putting local generation (solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, clean incineration-based, or hydro power) with local storage capacity in each fixed consumer location, and we can maximize many benefits. Excess capacity from the consumer location feeds back into the grid to handle peaks in other areas. Real-time cost-based “purchasing” of power could allow local storage at the consumer site to always be “topped off” or used to drive power hungry devices in the home when it makes the best sense—balancing the selling of excess power generated onsite with the lowest price available on the grid—or vice-versa. The gaming or arbitrage possibilities are endless.
Even this still hasn’t taken capabilities of the smart house components fitting into this scheme to further drive costs and efficiencies of the overall grid.
There are enormous security, privacy, public policy, and societal issues in this space. But given the number of good minds we could put behind it, those issues can’t be insurmountable.
Perhaps the iHouse isn’t that far off. And then the iDataCenter?
Interesting! They also probably had outlets that didn't turn off (for charging laptops, etc.)
They haven't massively deployed that because of cost of installing the devices? they still don't trust them, or what other issue do you think is holding them from mass adopting the technology?
I especially liked the idea that I can control how much consume based on what I've consumed already (or to plan to consume certain amount of energy/day and to let you adjust to that.
So in the future, my home utilities will literally run themselves. The bill would be automatically tallied from home usage and fed to my bank account automatically. I could make changes in service online.
Tag all this to a green utility company and an interactive refrigerator, and I can't wait to be a senior citizen to enjoy it all!
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