energy and obama

On WSJ.com, an article on energy appears on its most popular list. Prez O is going about the country and talking big about energy policy. In this specific article, he talks about smart grids. From various readings on smart grids, it looks as though a smart grid is essentially a "connected" grid. I use the word connected here in the sense of information. Just like your mobile phone is always connected to the network, this grid will always stay connected to some network and relay information back and forth about its load characteristics, surges, troughs, consumption patterns by type of consumers and such. For example, it can relay information about how a town uses its electricity when everyone is at work in factories or offices vis-a-vis how it uses it during thanksgiving or Christmas. That, in my opinion is a really good way to think about electricity. Since the time human kind started distributing energy in the way it is distributed today, this will be the first time that we will actually try to measure how we use it. So far, we simply measured as to how much we used at the end of a certain period. That enabled us to budget for a certain energy import bill (whether we were buying coal or crude). That also enabled consumers to manage general usage by active action such as switching off lights when leaving a room and such. If the smart grid actually provides the type of information that I imagine it can, then it paves the way for a large potential for devices that can automagically or actively monitor and control energy usage. Thats where the good stuff starts. Do you use anything like Quicken or Money? If you do, you probably are thankful to it for the reason that it can micro categorize all your household expenses and help you manage finances in a way that you cant manage with paper and pen. Now imagine what happens if all electronic devices in your house report back their power consumption patterns to your personal finance management software. You will suddenly be able to budget and plan your energy usage just as you can manage money usage, retirement plans, investments and such.

I know I am thrilled with this idea. There are two reasons. 1) I just personally love the idea of playing with data. 2) I can only imagine good things when this comes to business opportunities. Suddenly, there will be an larger market for smart devices and such tech stuff. For what I am alluding to, take a look at the interactive feature on another article on WSJ.com.