Smart Grid in Your Home

In the web portal, Wilson indicated when his family uses hot water so that their water heater could respond to that demand. “I go to bed at 11 p.m. and the hot water heater cuts off,” he says. “I get up at 7 a.m. My water heater starts heating around 6, so it's ready.” Once everyone leaves the house for the day, the hot water heater switches off, conserving energy throughout its unused daytime hours.

Finally, the Wilsons' pool pump was set to come on at 2 a.m. The pump will automatically shut off after a certain amount of time if, for example, Wilson turns the pump on when he takes a dip at 6 p.m. and then forgets to turn it off.

Consumers are alerted when they are in a “control event” so they can override the command if they want, Ebihara says. If you want to change a setting, you don't even have to be home. You could change your water heater setting before you sneak out of work early to make sure you had hot water for a shower at 3 p.m., for example.

Although programmable thermostats offer some of these energy saving benefits, they only work if people have them and actually use them. “In our pilot program in Raleigh [NC], only 15 percent of homes had programmable thermostats and of those, only 50 percent were actually programmed,” Ebihara says. By comparison, the online survey takes about 15 minutes to complete, at which point the homeowner can sit back and watch the energy savings commence. “We think most of America doesn't want to interact with their products every day,” Ebihara says. “We call it ‘set it and forget it.’ ”

The utility benefits by gaining additional capacity, Ebihara says. “We're in two-way, real-time communication between the consumer and the utility,” he adds. “We can present to the utility how much energy is being consumed at any point in time and be able to reduce that energy. If [the utility] sees a peak demand situation coming, it can reduce the load and reduce the load on the system.”

As for the Wilsons, they saved about $40 a month from September through April, with more savings possible during the summer. That's without time-of-use pricing, which is not part of this program. “Being on the trial has been fun,” Wilson says. “Ten years from now, this will be common.”