Lynne Kiesling
The Consumer Electronics Show has started, and we device and gadget geeks are having fun! One thing I noticed quickly is in this Engadget post about Oregon Scientific’s new device offerings:
Look at the device on the far right — it’s a wireless appliance manager “to help users keep an eye on how much energy up to eight appliances are using”. Look at how elegant it is! Clean, simple interface, shows the energy costs by appliance and a total energy cost for all of them, boom, done. It would probably not require much programming to make it transactive, so that the homeowner could choose trigger prices by appliance to make the appliances themselves price responsive.
That’s what I’m talking about when I effuse about the potential for in-home energy management technology. Clean, elegant design, transactive (or, in this case, potentially transactive) functionality.
It’s early in the CES; there’s more of this to come.
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More to come. Elizabeth Souder at the Texas Energy and Environment blog notes the announcement of a device sponsored by Direct Energy, Whirlpool, Best Buy, Lennox, and OpenPeak.
Link: http://energyandenvironmentblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2010/01/direct-energy-to-unveil-home-e.html
I have a post in the works on the Direct Energy/Whirlpool effort. Stay tuned.
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Exactly–a nice clean device by Oregon Scientific. Probably the same percentage of people will be interested in managing their home energy use as have bought, say, an Oregon Scientific weather monitor. Well, maybe even less–I have an OS weather monitor but my programmable thermostat is sadly never on the program, and it won’t be even on hourly energy rates–just not enough scratch to make it worth the hassle.