Smart Grid Blog

The Consumer Electronics Show is on the horizon (Jan 7-10, 2010) and will feature some new in home displays and wired appliances that will usher in a new era of home networking. Luckily for you faithful readers, the PSP blog will be on hand to cover all the exciting developments.

Here is list (in no particular order) of the most anticipated exhibitions:

Tendril:

As a leader in home energy management, Tendril will be showing the Tendril Tree…

via Power Smart Pricing: Top 5 Energy Display Devices Coming to CES 2010.

While the market for these devices is growing at a rapid pace, there are still some hurdles to be overcome before it becomes a mature, stable retail environment.

Fragmentation of Regulations

One of the problems facing consumers is the fragmentation of regulations governing these devices and their applications. Called EIDs, for energy information displays, these devices must meet a range of fiscal and regulatory regimes, both from a product design perspective and from a utility regulation viewpoint, which may vary from province to province, from state to state, and from one country to another.

via Home Energy Management Takes Off: Interest High for Devices and Applications to Monitor Energy Use..

Dozens of home energy monitors are coming to market, but nobody knows whether only hybrid Prius owners will use them.

Whole home energy monitors, or displays, are designed to help consumers conserve energy by providing far more detailed information than a monthly bill. These types of devices are already available, but millions more are poised to enter U.S. homes in the next two years, largely through utility-run smart grid programs.

via Do Home Energy Displays Change Behavior? | MyPointNow.

If you think it’s impossible to actually keep track of your electricity use, how you use it, or when you use it, think again. Green Tech reports that it’s only a matter of time before many of us will have access to a wealth of information about our energy usage. According to Pike Research, by 2015 there will be 28.1 million users of home energy information displays—accessed through smart meters, Web-based dashboards, or mobile phones—that will enable us to view our electricity consumption, often in real time.

via Energy Efficiency Displays Will Be Commonplace by 2015 | HeatingOil.com.

At this point, the number of creative ways that companies have developed to help home owners monitor and manage their energy consumption, seems to far surpass the volume of consumer interest. That’s OK, though, because the home energy management market is so new, and it’s still unclear which services and technologies will be the most successful. Here’s another new startup which had some funding news this morning: PowerHouse Dynamics, a year-old Newton, Mass.-based company, which has built the energy management tool “eMonitor.”

via PowerHouse Dynamics: Plug-Level Home Energy Management.

When you think Cisco, you generally think routers, not power plants. But increasingly, Cisco sees its future in the Smart Grid via a backdoor route — selling data center hardware to electric utilities. And that’s good news for anyone wanting to green their data center.

Cisco certainly isn’t ignoring selling products directly for the Smart Grid itself, including home devices to help people manage their electric use. As I’ve written in the past, Cisco expects that the Smart Grid use may even eventually dwarf the Internet.

But according to CNet, Cisco believes that utility companies will need to invest plenty of money in data centers in order to manage all the data that will be generated by the Smart Grid. Here’s what CNet says:

The tech giant is developing a suite of smart-grid products designed to add networking smarts to the existing grid, including routers for substations and home energy-monitoring systems. But a large chunk of the $20 billion per year in smart-grid spending that Cisco anticipates is in traditional data centers.

Since smart-grid technologies rely on a steady flow of information, Cisco expects that utilities will need to invest in more sophisticated IT systems, said Mark Weiner director of Data Center Solutions and a member of a Cisco smart-grid team.

via Cisco: We See our Future in the Smart Grid | Green Business | Reuters.