SOLAR TODAY Blog

By Seth Masia
SOLAR TODAY Managing Editor

About 15 years ago, when the Internet was just becoming available for commercial and consumer use, the marketing departments at appliance manufacturers invented the concept of the intelligent refrigerator. This brilliant machine would read the barcodes on items you put in and took out, thus tracking the household inventory on perishable foods. When you ran low on milk or boneless chicken, the refrigerator could go online and order up a restock shipment from your neighborhood grocer.

You may have noticed that no one is beating down the doors for intelligent refrigerators. Obviously, grocery shopping was not the killer app for networked appliances.

The killer app ought to be energy efficiency. General Electric thinks so.

The first generation of community-level smart-grid applications, now coming on line, involves a dialog between a household and the utility grid: The household meter tells the grid about its daily power-need patterns, and the grid uses the info to plan power generation and dispatch. At the same time, the meter tells the homeowner about hour-to-hour or minute-to-minute power use. Where the homeowner can keep an eye on the speedometer, home power consumption typically drops 20 to 30 percent.

The next generation of smart-grid technology will look inward at specific appliances. When the refrigerator, water heater, air conditioner, furnace, dishwasher, clothes washer and drier, recharging EV and electronic devices can plot together to reduce peak loads, the family has a real shot at slashing the utility bill and the carbon footprint.

Now General Electric is about to install "demand-response enabled" home appliances in ten residences, each equipped with a "home energy manager." The two-year pilot project is set to launch in early 2010 at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, in Abu Dhabi.

It's a start. Here's to the Smart Little Toaster.