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?

Says Don Tapscott in the HuffPo:

In many ways, the argument for a smart grid based on open standards parallels the argument for an open Internet. The old power grid is analogous to broadcast media with its bias towards centralized, one-way, one-to-many, one-size-fits-all communication.

Building a smart grid on open standards would, for example, allow software developers to build applications just as developers build apps for the iPhone.

Nothing really new in that article, of course, but it’s rather thrilling to see the concepts being spread to a wider audience by people who are relatively trusted to spread new ideas.

As always, there are a couple of caveats, though. First off, 15% energy reduction by mere knowledge of consumption sound impressive, but this number rests on purely anecdotal evidence and short term studies. Additionally, those studies took place in the USA only, which is commonly known for wasteful electricity consumption.

Further, an open standards Smart Grid will inevitably conflict with the need for security and safety in the grid, thus even if an Apple App-Store modeled applications store would be thinkable, it would be further limited.

Switching energy providers is still low, even in Germany. So I’m rather pleased to see that even the EU Members’ Energy Ministers finally acknowledge that engagement with energy consumption patterns is crucial.

A European Commission study found last month that EU consumers could save around €13 billion or €100 per household each year if they were to shop around for energy prices and switch to the cheapest tariff available to them. However, less than one in three consumers actually bother to do so. Liberalisation of the electricity market will therefore not be as beneficial to consumers as it could be, the study concluded. Consumers must be “properly trained and educated,” according to the energy ministers, who underlined that “the energy bill is one of the most important means of information to the consumer”.

In our demo we didn’t need to modify our existing ‘dumb’ kettle – we just hooked it up to Pachube and let a little bit of software handle the rest – perhaps in the end the smartest kettle is really just a kettle with an ip address.

Good wrap-up by Rob Day on the problems networked energy systems have in terms of adoption and development.

[…]in this sector it’s easy for startups to fool themselves into falsely thinking they’re not selling to utilities but only to end consumers and thus protected from the difficulties of selling to utilities; even “inside the meter” energy intelligence will somehow (via rebates, standards setting, etc.) involve utilities as critical stakeholders, and thus present a real rate-of-adoption challenge.

Short video introducing OpenEI.org. Unfortunately mostly US yet. Europe needs to get its act together…

As McKeel pointed out in the interview, a recent mashathon pulled all of that open data into a mashup that shows residents the cost of energy, usage rates and potential savings around the country. The mashup also provides access to incentive information. For instance, the incentive programs in the District of Columbia are all available with a click. That addresses a concern Micah Sifry articulated: people need a way to take personal action when they are presented with information.

<rant>

To most it is no secret that I spend a lot of time following the news, especially with regard to the web and energy. I’m a geek for that – and is my job. I was thrown on the topic about one and a half years ago, and I couldn’t resist it. That was the time when the now soon-to-be-abandoned “social media” was still called Web2.0 (yeah, seems like forever ago, doesn’t it?), the iPad was still a year out, Android and Google were still good, in short, all was well.

It was an exciting time to jump the Smart Grid Bandwagon, as it wasn’t huge topic (it still isn’t, but the area has grown considerably), the tech seemed convincing and the prospect of the market was immense.

Fast forward 18 months and frustration mounts, as the most promising projects suffer under mismanagement and higher-than-anticipated costs, the press are suckers for every story that portrays the downfall of hyped-technology, especially in the context of energy. And then there’s the studies, as the latest by German market research firm Forsa for the German consumer protection agency saying that less than 50% actually know what a smart meter is, and even if briefed, most of them wouldn’t bother to have one. They fear additional costs.

Costs has been the predominant argument against any progress in the field. State regulators in the US fry utilities for their proposed smart meter rollouts, and the only successful widespread roll outs (Italy, I’m looking at you) have been justified with the ability to detect and prevent electricity theft.

The core of the problem: as the forsa study rightfully points out: the consumer doesn’t care. He never does, and especially not so in terms of energy. He cares when there is no electricity in his home, and he cares once a year when he get’s the bill and is enraged for the amount he is supposed to pay. But there’s a chicken-egg problem here. We clearly need to help educate the consumer, even some knowledge about the consumption levels would help. Ironically, the very means of achieving this education, a visualisation of consumption, is blocked by that very fact that this education is lacking.

Usually this would be a chance for the geeks. Build their own devices, building software on top of that, watching and waiting for the market to mature. And there is experiments. There is homesense (backed by EDF) which gives participants of its project Arduino kits and let’s them do whatever with them (arguably, their focus is on homeautomation, not smart metering) but that’s not enough.

Sure, it’s a tough market, dominated by oligopolistic players, heavily politicised and un-sexy as hell.

But when we want to talk about the internet of things, don’t we need to talk about energy? This is the prime implementation. Where are the geeks?

</rant>