June 21, 2006

The National Grid of The Future?

Jon Udell has posted up the mp3 from a conversation he had with Mike Frost about intelligent energy management. It's an interesting discussion about how Mike's company, Site Control, are building telemetry and control networks in businesses to let them monitor and control their electricity usage.

The main drive in take-up seems to be cost-savings through increased efficiency and control of the businesses energy usage, but as Jon notes, as you get finer-grained control over your electricity it opens up opportunities for the grid to manage usage. Rather than cut power to entire companies, or entire streets of houses, when there is a shortage the power companies can ask (possibly just through dynamic prices) users to scale back their usage. Which would you prefer - brownouts and power-cuts, or a heating system that ran a couple of degrees cooler every now and then?

Jon has written more about the energy web in the past and hit's one of the big problems head on when he says:

"It's crazy, when you think about it, that your phone bill is exquisitely itemized but your electicity bill is a single number"

I think if we had better ways of visualizing our energy usage, maybe even some of these more imaginative, almost ambient displays as detailed on Open Loop's Energy Projects links page or Open Loop's own Buried Light project, then it would reduce the amount of energy wasted needlessly and increase pressure on appliance manufacturers to improve their products.

Posted by Adrian at June 21, 2006 03:52 PM | TrackBack

This blog post is on the personal blog of Adrian McEwen. If you want to explore the site a bit further, it might be worth having a look at the most recent entries or look through the archives or categories over on the left.

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