AUGUSTA, GA - Maybe you took advantage of desperate retailers this year to pick up some big new electronics, like a flat-screen TV or an iPod. But have you noticed that key items that keep your wired home running comfortably, such as your electricity meter and your thermostat, are unintelligible antiques compared to your cell phone and your netbook?

That’s about to change, as digital technology finally revolutionizes our energy delivery system.

The energy revolution doesn’t hinge on technological discovery. Indeed, the vast majority of technology it will draw on has existed for years, if not decades. The energy revolution is about something much more difficult to change: our own human behavior.

It’s a sunny day in a suburb east of San Francisco aptly nicknamed San Remote. The way the year has gone for me, I could easily be in Tampa, Tokyo, Dallas, Vancouver, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Washington, D.C., or even Augusta, not far from one of my company’s manufacturing plants.

I’m stuck in yet another beige, windowless conference room, in another chain hotel, seeing the same people repeating the same PowerPoint presentations. Welcome to another technical conference in the energy industry. Kafka couldn’t invent such absurd tedium. I want to scream.

Don’t these people feel the same sense of urgency I feel about radically evolving how we consumers consume electricity? I feel like we’re fiddling while Rome is suffering rolling blackouts.

We in the conference room are all striving to transform the very relationship between 21st-century consumers and the way they consume electricity, one of the most perishable and polluting commodities on the planet. On days like this one, it doesn’t feel like we’re striving with much urgency.

The morning is marching on to lunch. My name is next on the agenda, and I know that my presentation resembles all the preceding ones. I’ll be damned if I’m going to drone over the same buzzwords that have already stunned the audience into hypoglecemic coma. I decide to ad-lib.

Clutching a few scribbled points in my spiral-bound notebook of quadrille rule graph paper, I take the podium. Who here doesn’t know the name of my company or the products I’m going to talk about? I ask. Two hundred hands remain still. That’s what I thought. Click, click, click. Yada yada yada.

Instead of covering old ground, I tell the audience, I want to pose some trade-offs I have been thinking about, in hopes of shaping upcoming conversations during this conference.
These could all be bull, but at least it is new and different bull. I set up a few dichotomies between devices and the network that connects them, between openness and security, between investing in infrastructure now or waiting for more perfect technology later.

Without offering any answers, I retake my seat. The audience to me feels a little bewildered.

Mostly they are engineers, and many engineers aren’t used to ad-lib, improvisation, unexpected behavior or leaving dichotomies unanswered. At least now, momentarily, they are feeling something other than boredom or hunger.

The world is on the cusp of an energy revolution akin to that of digital information and networked devices. Indeed, the energy revolution draws on the digital, networked age — finally. I believe that 2009 will be a pivotal year for this energy revolution. A number of factors, both short- and long-term, are converging on this year.

As marked by Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and the rise of the Toyota Prius, popular culture has accepted the concepts of constrained fossil fuel supplies and rising greenhouse gas emissions leading to global climate change.

The U.S. elections in 2008 changed the political climate in the most polluting nation on the planet. The economic collapse of 2008 will force the building of a new economy.

Starting in 2009, utilities throughout North America began equipping millions of homes with new residential energy management technology based on a combination of sensors, computers and communications. During the energy revolution, our everyday landscape will change, too.

Consultant Dr. Geoffrey Moore uses the metaphor of a tornado to describe the phenomena of when technology moves from labs and nerds to homes and desktops and purses. In his book “Inside the Tornado,” he even likens this process to the tornado in the movie “The Wizard of Oz.” The cyclone picks Dorothy’s house out of the flat, monochrome Kansas landscape and drops it in the Technicolor land of Oz.

In our lives, we have already seen this process with personal computers and cell phones and the World Wide Web and digital imaging. In the next few years, you’ll see the same level of cyclonic transformation with plug-in cars, computerized electricity meters, networked thermostats and home appliances that engage in machine-to-machine communication.

 

After escaping the beige conference room for the evening, I meet with the vice president of a startup energy device company. He looks awfully young to me, sitting across the table in our booth at the Japanese restaurant.

I’ve previously talked by phone with others from his company, but this is the first face-to- face meeting between our organizations. His company wants to make, among other things, a next-generation thermostat.

These thermostats will be nothing like today’s tin lumps with knobs and sliders and mercury switches. These thermostats will be as smart and communicative as cell phones.

They’ll have microprocessors and LCD touch screens. They’ll talk to your air conditioner and to your electricity meter and to your plug-in car. They’ll know, courtesy of your electricity provider, when the price of electricity is high or the state of the power grid is fragile, and automatically adjust your heater or air conditioner according to the needs of the situation and the settings you have chosen.

A number of companies are racing to build and sell these new types of thermostats. The companies or, more accurately, the venture capitalists providing most of the money, see an opportunity to sell a new computerized device to every household that uses electricity — and that’s a lot of households.

Not all of these aspiring companies will succeed. For the revolution to really work, most of them need to fail so that the market can standardize around just a few solid choices. The revolution is in part about new technology becoming everyday infrastructure, the way computers and cell phones are now commonplace.

Successful infrastructure is as ubiquitous as plugs and sockets, bolts and wrenches, and just as standardized. Computers and cell phones became ubiquitous because they solved very common problems, and because they built upon a small number of interoperable standards. “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC.”

We order the obligatory sushi, along with edamame, katsu, tempura, udon. This young VP’s company just might survive the coming tornado. They are starting to understand the implications of a smart, communicating thermostat.

Such a device can’t just be placed on a store shelf and advertised. It must operate within the entire power delivery system, an ecosystem that rivals the financial markets for complexity, flux and impact. Part of my job is to help find the potential survivors of the coming tornado and build a relationship with them.

Sometimes I wonder how my own employer will fare. Sure, we’re one of the largest global suppliers of electricity meters and associated networks, software and services. We have more next-generation meters under contract than all our competitors combined. We’re also six months past our internal deadline for delivering a simple product development and testing kit to help companies such as this startup.

Market analysts, venture capitalists and environmentalists are still watching to see if consumers view the cost of electricity and the emitting of greenhouse gases as problems common enough to drive adoption of new electricity infrastructure. Plenty of studies and pilot projects point to the ability for consumers to reduce their consumption voluntarily and meaningfully, when given the information and tools to do so. The main question is whether consumers perceive enough threats or potential benefits to make them permanently change their behavior.

The boyish VP wants to know more about how his company can be a partner with mine. I run through my personal checklist of requirements: compliance with the same technology standards we use, integration into utility data networks and business processes, independent contacts at joint customers. Check, check and check. I decide that we should invite the startup in for further discussions.

 

On the side of most houses hangs a small round or square collection of gears and dials measuring the flow of electricity into the home. Through magnetism, a metal disc can be made to spin at a rate corresponding to the flow of electrical current through a power line.

This electro-mechanical metering has not changed substantially in form or function in decades.

If they were brought back to life, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse and Nikolai Tesla would recognize these meters. Utilities buy these devices for roughly $30 a piece and expect them to operate accurately in the field for 20 or 30 years. “In the field” means working throughout decades of exposure to heat, cold, rain, snow, sun, wind and dirt.

It’s an amazing technology, really. Imagine if your grocery store still used cash registers from the 1930s. As much as possible, a meter has to work flawlessly without any additional service. Compared to the initial price of the device, the cost of a qualified technician to travel to a home and work on a meter is expensive (equipment, fuel, insurance, salary, benefits), so utilities avoid visiting a meter whenever possible.

When it comes to applying technology, I’ve heard utilities described as the Amish of the industries. Since the mid-1990s, computer and telecommunication technology has been slowly but increasingly finding its way into the utility world. Electricity meters started to become computerized, like everything else.

Modems and wireless transceivers shrank and changed so that they could fit into a computerized meter. Now utilities have access to technology that allows them to read a meter every 15 minutes automatically over a communication network, instead of just once a month by hand. Better measurement is the first step to better management.

Now, in the 21st century, we’re becoming accustomed to networked devices. Our power delivery system is becoming a network of networks. This is the technology side of the energy revolution. Soon you’ll have a network for energy devices inside your home, your electricity meter will be part of a neighborhood network of meters, and neighborhoods will be networked directly to the data centers of your utility. But all of this technology won’t mean a thing if smart thermostats sit on living room walls without configuration or input from homeowners, with their clocks blinking 12:00 like so many VCRs in 1982.

 

Can we change our energy consuming ways? Plenty of academic studies over tconductedhe last 30-plus years say that yes, we consumers can change our behavior and conserve four to 15 percent of our monthly energy consumption. Simple technology, like double-pane windows and better home insulation, can help without any behavior modification. Programmable thermostats can help automate better consumption behavior around heating and cooling, which accounts for a large portion of home energy bills.

But two recent, real-life scenarios show how efficient we can be when necessity calls. In 2001, California was experiencing a dire shortage of energy and the subsequent spike in energy prices.

At the time, no one knew this crisis was engineered by Enron as a money-making venture.

For the energy-zapping summer months, then-governor Gray Davis put into effect the 20/20 Rebate program: for June through September, consumers would receive a 20 percent rebate on their monthly power bill if they cut their consumption by 20 percent compared to the same month one year prior.

According to the California Energy Commission, more than 30 percent of customers qualified for the rebates. Overall power consumption declined in the range of five to 12 percent. (It’s worth noting that this level of conservation occurred in what was already the most energy efficient state in the nation.)

The other real-life scenario happened last year in Juneau, Alaska. In April of 2008, a series of avalanches wiped out electricity transmission towers delivering inexpensive power to Juneau from a nearby hydroelectric plant.

While the transmission lines were repaired, the city would have to make electricity using backup diesel-powered generators that cost several times more than hydropower to operate. Consumers were faced with the choice of either paying much, much higher bills, or drastically conserving power. Usage across Juneau immediately dropped by 30 percent and remained there during the six weeks needed to repair the towers. Once transmission was restored and electricity prices returned to normal, usage crept up but didn’t immediately return to pre-avalanche levels.

One lingering question is, are we at the point where necessity is calling all of us, all the time, to be smarter about our energy consumption?

 

Two more days have crawled by in beige hotel conference rooms. I’m still in San Remote. It’s a week for back-to-back industry meetings. At least these last days are labeled “working meetings.”

Maybe I’d feel less like screaming if I avoided all non-working meetings. These two days are part of a process to define the way that next-generation energy devices like smart thermostats can communicate over both wireless and wired networks using a common language.

I’m in one corner of the room, working with a small group of people from across the electricity industry, trying to devise a simple, standardized way that anyone could go to Home Depot, purchase a smart thermostat and install it so that it communicates with their electricity meter and thus their utility. That process must be as easy as activating a new credit card, something we Americans seem to accomplish all too easily.

The main problem with smart thermostats is security. We don’t want anyone using a smart thermostat as a terminal for hacking into utility data or control systems. Many new meters will include remote-control shutoff switches and we don’t want people hijacking those.
Making things easy takes a lot of work behind the scenes. Those little USB ports on your computer that let you plug in your iPod or your thumb drive? There are 482 pages of official specification pertaining to just that port.

After three hours of “What if we” and “How about” and “If we did it this way,” my little group isn’t appreciably closer to solving our assigned problem. It’s hard to think the energy revolution is going to sweep the world in 2009 when we can’t figure out how to get a thermostat from the store shelf to the living room wall. My group has been assuming the lowest level of consumer education and ability. I wonder to myself if it isn’t time to expect more.

In their 2007 Reliability Assessment, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation found that energy consumption was projected to increase by 135,000 megawatts over 10 years. However, they could only identify 77,000 megawatts in new energy generation becoming available over the same 10 years. That left a shortfall of 58,000 megawatts.