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The Internet of Things is bringing Electricity 2.0 that much closer

One of the reasons I started working with GreenMonk back in 2008 was that James heard my Electricity 2.0 vision, and totally bought into it.

The idea, if you’re not familiar with it, was that as smart grids are deployed, homes will become more connected, devices more intelligent, and home area networks would emerge. This would allow the smart devices in the home (think water heaters, clothes dryers, dish washers, fridges, electric car chargers, etc.) to listen to realtime electricity prices, understand them, and adjust their behaviour accordingly. Why would they want to do this? To match electricity demand to its supply, thereby minimising the cost to their owner, while facilitating the safe incorporation of more variable suppliers onto the grid (think renewables like solar and wind).

That was 2008/2009. Fast forward to the end of 2013 and we see that smart meters are being deployed in anger, devices are becoming more intelligent and home area networks are becoming a reality. The Internet of Things, is now a thing (witness the success of devices like Nest’s Thermostat and Protect, the Philips Hue, and Belkin’s WeMo devices). Also, companies like Gridpoint, Comverge and EnerNoc are making demand response (the automatic reduction of electricity use) more widespread.

We’re still nowhere near having realised the vision of utility companies broadcasting pricing in realtime, home appliances listening in and adjusting behaviour accordingly, but we are quite a bit further down that road.

One company who have a large part to play in filling in some of the gaps is GE. GE supplies much of the software and hardware used by utilities in their generation, transmission and distribution of electricity. This will need to be updated to allow the realtime transmission of electricity prices. But also, GE is a major manufacturer of white goods – the dish washers, fridges, clothes dryers, etc. which will need to be smart enough to listen out for pricing signals from utilities. These machines will need to be simple to operate but smart enough to adjust their operation without too much user intervention – like the Nest Thermostat. And sure enough, to that end, GE have created their Connected Appliances division, so they too are thinking along these lines.

More indications that we are headed the right direction are signalled by energy management company Schneider Electric‘s recently announced licensing agreement with ioBridge, and Internet of Things connectivity company.

Other big players such as Intel, IBM and Cisco have announced big plans in the Internet of Things space.

The example in the video above of me connecting my Christmas tree lights was a trivial one, obviously. But it was deliberately so. Back in 2008 when I was first mooting the Electricity 2.0 vision, connecting Christmas tree lights to the Internet and control them from a phone wouldn’t have been possible. Now it is a thing of nothing. With all the above companies working on the Internet of Things in earnest, we are rapidly approaching Electricity 2.0 finally.

Full disclosure – Belkin sent me a WeMo Switch + Motion to try out.

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iPod team lead founds company to make home energy management sexy

The former head of Apple’s iPod Division, Tony Fadell, left Apple and founded a company making… thermostats.

No, really!

In January of 2010 Apple launched the iPad and I wrote a post here asking if Apple could make home energy management sexy. I speculated that because Apple had lodged patent applications for a Home Energy Management system, their iPad rollout would be the perfect platform to deliver it on. For whatever reason, this never came to pass.

Why is it important? Well, heating/cooling makes up around 50% of the energy used in a typical house – that’s a lot of energy/money/CO2.

Why is it necessary? Well, traditional thermostats are analagous to VCR’s in the 1980’s. Remember the flashing 00:00 you used to see on them? That was because they had an appalling user interface and almost no-one could figure out how to set the timer on them.

Well, the situation is not much better for today’s programmable thermostats. As I wrote in this post last year:

Thermostat

Thermostat

Look at the thermostat above. This is the thermostat to control the central heating/air conditioning in my home. I like to think I am reasonably technical. I have been a Windows sysadmin for a multi-national company, managing Windows, Exchange, Active Directory, ISA and SQL Servers. I edit php files regularly, I remotely manage my own CentOS server via SSH and I?ve even done quite a bit of regex scripting of .htaccess files!

But this thermostat is beyond me!

I know it has a timer, so it should be possible to set it to come on and off at pre-arranged times. Should. Getting it to do so seems to require a Stephen Hawking-like intellect. And, even if I did manage to figure it out, it is so unintuitive that the next time the clock goes forward (or back), I?d have forgotten again and would need to start over! Which begs the question, if my phone knows when to change its clock forward or back, why doesn?t the thermostat ? but I digress!

This is far too much hassle entirely. So I don?t use the timer in my thermostat. Or any of its functionality (apart from on/off). And I?m far from being alone in this.

Home energy management systems have, to-date, suffered from having appalling user interfaces. Consequently, no-one uses them.

Well, that’s about to change – as the video above demonstrates, the Nest thermostat not only has a simple iPod-like interface, it also learns your schedule and automatically adjusts the temperature settings to match them. Furthermore, when connected to your wifi, it can be adjusted remotely via phone, iPad, or browser – forget to turn off the heat/aircon when you went out shopping, or coming home early from work? No prob, open the Nest app on your phone and adjust the thermostat remotely from there!

The device also takes account of local weather conditions in its algorithms. It downloads firmware updates and it maintains a history of your use so you can see how your behaviour affected your energy use.

This does, indeed, seem to be a very cool device (pardon the pun) and one which sorely needed, which leads me to my main gripe with the Nest – it is only on sale in the US.

Here’s hoping they start selling them outside the US very soon.