This nice article is important in that it reveals two things if the two utility companies talked about are representative of the industry.

Firstly, no one knows exactly what combination of in-home technology and communications with residential consumers will be the most beneficial, so our utility companies are using and are planning on a variety of projects to find out. Given the limited money utilities can charge through rate increases, and limited government handouts that are available, they not surprisingly want to get the biggest bangs for their dollars.

Secondly, communication with the customer, whether it be with the customer themselves or with the customer's in-home equipment, is a common thread no matter what form the in-home technologies are, and no matter whether the communication is in real time or not.

I would say a real-time in-home energy display is a common piece that would satisfy the need for communication with the customer in all its envisioned forms. Companies that are making or are prepared to make in-home displays typically equip them with human interfaces but are also quite capable of putting the any necessary communication hooks in them to interface with any other in-home equipment such as personal computers, Home Area Networks, smart thermostats, smart appliances, pool-pump or air conditioning controls, etc.

In essence an in-home display could / should be standardized with accepted methods for interfacing to all the anticipated uses of utility-to-customer communications. It would form a gateway into a customer's residence particularly using the smart meter as a communications portal from an AMI network into residential homes.

Perhaps those developing industry standards for smart grid, like the IEEE for instance, should consider setting standards for in-home displays FIRST, and the rest of the in-home technologies afterwards.

Cycling your AC/heat pump off and on during peak periods is mainly for the utility company's benefit to lower total peak demand on the grid, not necessarily save you money although it marginally does. The AC/heat pump is typically the largest load in the house and gives them the biggest load shed i.e. the biggest bang for their effort.

Adding electronics and IT to your house would open up the possibility to track your consumption over time instead of seeing it once every billing period, and as Len says actively practice more load shifting to off-peak periods, either on request from the utility company, or by monitoring prices as they change in real time and shedding or moving a variety of loads to other times in some automated fashion. The latter may not necessarily lower total consumption but it can lower your bill substantially.

Another benefit of tracking your consumption in real time is the potential ability to associate energy costs to specific loads in your house, or identify phantom loads that are on all the time and associate energy costs to those.

A trivial example, say you have AC-powered garden lights on every night, or Christmas lighting during the month of December. While their load contribution is only a fraction of overall house consumption over a long time period, many average consumers are not aware of what they actually cost to run every day, week, or month. Once informed, consumers can make more judicious choices in how long to run them, or when shopping to buy new ones.

Your comments reminded me of the times long past when one would surrender his gold coins to the purser on an ocean voyage. While this was a valid security method it was also a bit of a scam. The purser would put the gold coins in a keg that was free to roll from side to side as the ship sailed, slightly abrading the coins. The keg acquired minute but valuable gold.

More recently remember how folks were advised not to carry their golf clubs around in the trunks of their cars? Remember how we were admonished to keep our tires inflated to the proper pressure? Remember how we were advised to have tune-ups? All to save energy. Utter nonsense. None of this amounted to anywhere close to a hill of beans. When I was a kid hot water was often for a once a week bath. Tell people to not take a shower every day, the first people on earth to do so. This would actually save some energy.

Look, I am not a Luddite. Rather I’m an engineer almost by definition one who seeks to increase efficiency. The ability of humans to procreate swamps geology and engineering.

Efficiency upgrades is a big topic not given much attention by smart grid technology.

Another potential benefit of tracking your specific energy uses in real time, and determining their associated costs, is the ability to GUAGE the energy and financial results of efficiency upgrades a consumer chooses to make. It will even help with purchase decisions when consumers are offered efficiency upgrade incentives from government rebates, tax exemptions, or potentially utility financial perks if regulators ever allow it someday.

Reconciling energy bills under Time-Of-Use rates is another looming problem that smart grid could help to address. When TOU are forced on us soon with all the emerging smart meters, consumers will more than ever need to verify their energy bills with real-time data. Otherwise average consumers will have no clue what they will save from load shifting to off-peak hours.

Picture a couple of residential consumers who routinely compare utility bills. It is mathematically possible for each to have similar or even identical total energy consumption amounts but very different bills under TOU rates. Without tracking their energy uses to reconcile their bills, the consumer with the higher bill will immediately suspect they are being ripped off by their utility company. Conversely the clever or intelligent consumer who load shifts will want to know just how much he is saving for each load-shift he is considering making, because let’s face it, load shifting will mean lifestyle changes which won’t come easy unless consumers know what they are going to get for swallowing them.

Given 6.8 billion people and still increasing at about 0.1 billion a year there is no combination of all the proposed solutions being implemented that will preserve our civilization.

Just today I read that China will likely from now on produce more cars per annum than the US. China, already the largest user of coal, plans to increase coal production by 30% in just five or six years. I don’t think Kyoto II in Copenhagen can off-even that. (Yet the big news focuses on a photo voltaic solar project in Inner Mongolia.)

The story in India is much the same and their population is growing fast enough to overtake China soon. 600 million have no electricity at all, the rest suffer daily outages. They will build coal burners.

Nigeria has 140 million people and almost no electricity. Without base load capacity are they going to build green plants?

It’s about numbers, so the wonderful things in Iceland and Denmark don’t amount to a hill of beans.

If electric cars get their energy from fossil fuel generation CO2 emissions go up not down and overall thermal efficiency is much less than if they burned gasoline.

All over the world water supply is problematic and water tables are getting lower.

I could go on. And I wish I were wrong,

Seems to me that in the overall picture, forcing people to use electricity at the right time by electronics is a little like speed bumps. Speed bumps are only used when dealing with very inferior human beings.

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