Connectivity Week (Santa Clara, end of May 2011), is the yearly event in the Bay Area where the grid industries (utilities, power plants, transmission operators, cities) and the IT industry meet every year to discuss and make deals around the smart grid. This year Intel will feature the Intel® Home Energy Dashboard. This is not new. It was presented last year at CES. Like Microsoft, Google, and other consumer technology companies, Intel pushes ahead in its effort to enter the home with a system that gives average energy end-users control over their energy usage. This is a great leap forward which still leaves great questions looming. No Intel didn’t wait for appliance manufacturer to finally deploy connectivity and on-board energy management or for the utilities to finally deploy a smart meters made for the consumers, not for meter readers. They just deployed this:
The video shows a system that seems fairly easy to deploy (connectivity to appliances through plugs, communication through WIFI with all devices, the utility, and more). Ability to monitor, control, and optimize energy usage. For all the activity, though, there remain questions about how much consumers are willing to pay to better manage home energy and whether Intel or any other tech provider can make money helping consumers save money. Even ability to use this tablet PC-based energy dashboard as a video conferencing device with other users in other homes. But the question remains: are consumers willing to pay for a device that will still require learning and time to manage their energy usage, when they have spend the best part of the last 50 years consuming energy usually without having to worry about its cost?
In a recent CNET article, Martin LaMonica, says: “Utility executives are acutely aware of the need to improve consumer engagement to make the grid more efficient.” and “At the same time, analysts say that better energy management in commercial buildings and putting sensors on the transmission line to improve efficiency is typically a much easier business case than residential systems. So why the rush into home energy management?”
Here is a question for you, what if the solution was rather in more automation of energy management. It seems to e that with a nice PC in the home (like the Intel dashboard is based on), sensors at every plug or in appliances themselves, it should be rather easy to reduce a good part of wasted energy use just by usage pattern detection such as: Turn TV off when it’s been without channel or volume flipping for more than two hours, or when the alarm system didn’t detect a presence in the room for an extended period. Allow fridge to cycle in a wider range of temperatures without kicking compressor back on between 3AM and 6AM when it’s obvious the door won’t open by a user. Turn heaters off when the alarm system or wall plug volumetric presence detectors haven’t detected a presence in a room for more than 2 hours. etc. etc.
In other words, why putting the onus on the consumer when there seems to be enough technology and data in the dashboard to automate some of the decisions? Any thoughts?