What if your refrigerator got its own electricity bill?
I talked this week with Adrian Tuck, CEO of Tendril, about interesting ways the U.S. power delivery grid could be modernized. Tendril, it needs to be said, could gain a lot from the nationwide adoption of smart grid technologies, since it makes software and designs hardware that collects electricity use data from appliances and then processes that data for utility companies and consumers.
The big idea that Tuck and I discussed is a concept that's only now boring its way through the thick bureaucracies of the utility companies: what if, instead of power companies charging for electricity at the power meter, which is the point of where it leaves their power lines, they instead were able to charge individual appliances and other devices for the power they used, regardless of where they used it?
Adrian Tuck, CEO, Tendril
(Credit: Tendril)What's the difference? It's this: suppose I have a Tesla Roadster, and I drive 240 miles (the Tesla's range) from my house to yours, to see you. I need to recharge my car to get back home. If I plug it in at your place, that will cost you about $4, Tesla says. A small price to pay for the pleasure of my company, but nonetheless isn't it unfair for you to pay for my car's fuel? And if you're talking about parking lots full of cars at businesses, this cost could add up. If cars and power companies could communicate directly, that charge could go to the cars' owners, not the owner of the building where they plug in.
Other devices that use a lot of energy--refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners--could give their owners some control over whose energy they use and when they use it. Tuck says that the idea of energy that's billed to devices instead of homes is "the equivalent of number portability" for electricity. It would allow manufacturers to build devices that let their owners choose which electricity producer they want to use to power their devices. Want cheap but polluting coal power right now? Go ahead and dial that in. Want green wind power instead (and the carbon credits with it)? Set your washer to run only when there's "wind on the grid," and let the provider who generates that power send you a bill for the electricity you use.
Tuck even talked about the idea of appliances with pre-paid kilowatt-hours. You could go to Home Depot, buy a window-mount air conditioner with a summer's worth of cooling already built in to it. Such a device would certainly make consumers more aware of the power they're using. (It's also a great gift idea, if you ask me.)
Tilting at windmills
This vision is, for the most part, a fantasy right now. Except in Texas, power generation, delivery, and sales are not deregulated enough to allow such services, much less encourage utility companies to push for this kind of a re-think of their businesses.
But there's real consumer value in putting a little electricity meter in every appliance or electric car. Tuck says that consumers who get better information on their energy consumption than the current monthly bills use less power--up to 15 percent less, depending on the quality and timeliness of the data.
Appliances with energy-reporting chips will start coming out in 2011, he says. They'll just offer reporting capabilities to the utility and the consumer; the idea of allowing users to select different energy supplies for individual appliances is still a long way off.
But the idea of charging devices' registered owners for the services they use is powerful and interesting. This is how cellular phones work. You can get phones where you pay for exactly what you use, no more and no less, because the phones and their service providers know what services you're using. Drive that kind of granular service data into the appliances that consume the majority or our electricity and there's no telling what kind of innovation we'd get--and with it, presumably, smarter use of the limited energy resources we have.
See also: Gridpoint, Comverge, Greenbox, Wattvision, and more stories about Tendril.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
We want lots of power, we want it now, and we want it cheap. That is the only energy challenge that means anything.
Notebook computers at a friends house. Or for my issue, Notebook computers or other items at a public building. We are having more people come in to charge their devices, I have always wondered just how much does that contribute to our electric bill.
BOB
Then run 'em at capacity 24/7; and when demand for electricity is lower, use the excess to make hydrogen, and sell it to power hydrogen fuel cell cars.
People want cheap, abundant power; and we aren't about to get it any time soon from wind and solar...
Build nukes, build lots, build 'em now.
Don't drink the tree-hugger Kool-Aid. They don't really care about preserving our environment or preserving us, they just want to force us to live like we did in the Middle Ages, because they enjoy watching us suffer.
A. There is a limited supply of uranium. As more reactors come online around the world demand will increase greatly.
B. We will just be funneling energy dollars to a different hostile countries.
C. It takes decades to build a nuke plant. It also takes large amounts of CO2 generating raw materials.
D. Nuclear waste has no home. Taxpayers are subsidizing it's storage at nuke plants already.
At my place my family of 5 uses about 300 kilowatts of electricty (mon)through this approach- why would anyone pay
a utility $100 a month or more every month in perpeturity** $30. electric bills are much better EVERYONE SHOULD
HAVE AN ENERGY AUDIT PERFORMED(EXPERTLY) AND REDUCE WASTE AND DEFIENCIES -THUS
NEGATING THE NEED FOR MORE CHERNOBYLS IN WAITING!
Or we could use a trans-uranium element like element 115 but the nsa will never let that happen learn why!
the SAGE
"Funnel money to hostile countries?"
Canada #1 producer of Uranium, Australia, #2 - Hostile to USA, not likely...
Chernobyl, of course that thing is/was bad, unskilled workers with AK-47's pointed at them constructing a poorly designed obsolete reactor, it was destined to fail from the start...
Chernobyl is the Eco-kool aid drinkers Columbine!
Mandate Solid State Lighting - outlaw ?ban incandescent lights its easily done and would
result in a much better planet ( which is somewhat important- at least to my family)
In effect buildup of infrastructure should enable new services.
Now here, i see that companies will spend this $$ and continue to deliver the same service, with some additional discretionary data. This is like a telco stating that they re-build their wireline/wireless network to provide the capability to give you a bill for each call you made.
So is this smart grid(solution) in search of a problem to solve. I am sure there is a better explanation, but i could not understand it from this article. Anyone with more creative ideas on what we can achieve here.
entitlement that greedy us citizens would waste so much energy with little remorse or
concern that is a global problem/// and those of us who use 20 - 30 kilowatts dailly we
are the culprits !!
Sound like the person using 10 kilowatts dailly -they are patriotic and intelligent/frugal
-Maybe the're amish ( joke) I WOULD DEFINETLY PREFER $30. monthly comed bills!
- by rochenle November 9, 2009 3:02 PM PST
- Adrian's got a great vision and a lot of style. Well funded one in Dot.Com style. He's aiming for the implementation of his vision at the entire utiity level. But I don't think it's practical for the general population. The core technology is available off the shelf: Echelon and others make the sensors and have solved the communications issue, both in the house and upstream to the utility. One of the best and most practical in this world is the TED "The Energy Detective" . You can also get real time energy usage with such devices as the "Kill-O-Watt"
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(17 Comments)Want practical real-time energy monitoring for nearly free? Talk to your utility about "Pay as you go" or Prepaid" electricity. You can get usage info over the web, via text messaging, e-mail, Google Powermeter and in some cases with an in-home display. It's not as precise to the device level as Tendril's vision, but you have to start somewhere.