meters

Is this the summer of discontent for smart meters?

Utility Baltimore Gas & Electric is in the process of working with regulators get approval for a plan to install smart meters at some of its customers, one of the cases drawing interest by smart-grid industry watchers.

During hearings last Thursday and Friday, BG&E made changes to the proposal, which was rejected by regulators in June. The Maryland Public Service Commission had concluded that consumers were shouldering too much of the cost and risk of the proposal, which led to last week's hearings and counterproposal.

As part of … Read more

WASHINGTON--Google's PowerMeter is a straightforward application for monitoring home electricity at this point, but the company expects to stretch its features toward managing an array of energy loads in the home, according to an executive.

PowerMeter gets data from smart meters or home electricity monitors and displays that data on a PC or smartphone, which helps people better understand electricity usage and leads to clues on how to cut bills. But "we're just getting going" with PowerMeter, said Dan Reicher, director of climate change initiatives at Google, here at the Kema Utility of the Future conference … Read more

The smart grid for Plumas-Sierra County, Calif., is now operating via the television broadcasting system's "white space," software and service supplier Spectrum Bridge announced Wednesday.

The TV white space spectrum is the portion of unused broadcast TV channels that became available with the national switch from analog to digital TV broadcasting.

The space is prized because it can provide a venue for data exchange rates significantly faster than the current standard Internet Wi-Fi, and can be broadcast for extended distances and through obstacles, making it ideal for use in smart grid communications.

For years, Dell, Google, Microsoft, Motorola, and others lobbied the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to open up the space … Read more

In a rush to take advantage of U.S. stimulus money, utilities are quickly deploying thousands of smart meters to homes each day--smart meters that experts say could easily be hacked.

The security weaknesses could potentially allow miscreants to snoop on customers and steal data, cut off power to buildings, and even cause widespread outages, according to a number of experts who have studied the meters and looked into smart-grid systems. A new paper out of the University of Cambridge highlights privacy concerns from smart meters, as well as security risks caused by linking home-area networks, of which smart meters … Read more

Google has signed a deal to connect its PowerMeter home energy software to monitoring devices from Current Costs in the U.K.

Current Costs' energy monitors, designed to sit on kitchen tables or to hang on a wall, give people a view into their electricity consumption by displaying real-time usage and projections for monthly usage and costs.

By showing where electricity is consumed, people can take steps to conserve. For example, a person can see that current use is higher than normal and turn an appliance off, or switch to more efficient lighting and see the money savings. To "… Read more

IBM is hoping its new smart metering system can help homeowners learn to use energy more wisely.

Working with energy consultant Hildebrand, Big Blue has embarked on a new project designed to let people view their energy consumption in the home. Hildebrand's monitoring technology analyzes real-time electricity usage, even for individual appliances, to show folks just how much juice they're grabbing.

In a 30-month research project geared specifically for the U.K. and Bulgaria, Hildebrand installed small energy monitors at different homes in five European cities--Birmingham, Bristol, and Manchester in the U.K., and Plovdiv and Ivanovo in … Read more

Consumers needs better operating instructions for the smart grid, a survey published on Wednesday shows.

A Boston Consulting Group study found that the majority of consumers surveyed are willing to tap into the information from smart meters to conserve energy. But utilities haven't done a good enough job of enabling people to use their two-way meters constructively.

The survey of 1,700 U.S. consumers, which was done online last December, found a strong interest in lowering energy use. Seventy-five percent of respondents said they were interested in finding easy ways to save power and two-thirds said that getting … Read more

Google on Wednesday released the API for its PowerMeter energy-monitoring Web application, a move that could let people get detailed home energy data without the need for a smart meter.

The Web application gives people a real-time graph of electricity usage and historical data with the goal of providing clues on how to ratchet down power use.

So far, Google has partnered with a few utilities which are offering PowerMeter to consumers as part of smart-meter rollouts. One device maker, which makes The Energy Detective (TED) monitor, has an option to display electricity data on PowerMeter.

By making the PowerMeter … Read more

CheckUp is an easy-to-use multipurpose maintenance utility that can help you monitor and improve your Mac's performance. Its very visual interface uses colorful and dynamic icons, graphs, and dials to display performance and data over eight different categories: Profile (including uptime and a bandwidth tally), System (especially great for seeing which OS your Mac can handle), Processors (twin dials for dual processors, plus a temperature monitor), Memory (configuration, usage, and testing), Disks (all partitions, with an option for repairing permissions), Network (showing input and output in a customizable graph), Processes (a prettier, more flexible version of OS X's … Read more