Wired has an interesting report about a Smart Meter rollout in Chattanooga, TN.

The network will serve as the conduit for 80 billion data points on electricity use per year that could help the utility run more efficiently, reduce outages, and give customers more control over their monthly electricity expenses.

Smart-grid management technologies from Bell Laboratories will enable EPB to harvest millions of data points on energy usage, helping it to better understand when and where energy is used. The utility has a distribution capacity of 3,000 megawatts but peak demand of just 1,320 megawatts, creating inefficiencies in the system, Wade said. EPB loses 3.5 percent to 4 percent of its energy in distribution and transmission, mostly due to transformers that are often larger than necessary for their load. Software can help EPB optimize equipment for actual usage patterns.

One should note that only about 500,000 people live in the metro area, yet this roll-out produces massive amounts of data. There’s interesting times ahead…

And did you read about that 1GB/s connection speeds? Can we get that in Europe, too, please?