Smart appliance systems are on the way

MONTREAL, QUEBEC - Imagine telephoning your fridge from your beach chair in Prince Edward Island to tell it to cycle down and save you money.

Or being paid to park your electric car at your downtown office because its battery will feed the grid. Or knowing when your children turn on the television set on any given day simply by looking at your utility bill.

All of this — and much more — will be possible with “smart” electricity grids, according to current forecasts by electric utility experts and industry analysts. Some projections, such as getting paid to park, are just emerging from the concept stage, and we aren’t likely to see them for decades, but others have become fact.

Laurie Reid accessed her utility bill by computer while at work and pulled up a detailed account of her householdÂ’s recent electrical consumption. She chose to view it on a hour-by-hour basis and focused on a particular Tuesday.

“From 10 to 11 p.m., we consumed 1.2 kilowatt-hours," Reid said from her Toronto office. “That’s a lot. There must have been a hockey game on the television and my husband made popcorn.”

Toronto Hydro is one of a growing number of North American utilities using so-called smart meters to provide customers with detailed information about their electricity consumption. It is also among those that use time-of-use pricing to encourage clients to minimize consumption during peak periods.

These smart meters, which provide for communication between supplier and user, are seen as critical building blocks for the smart grid, which is itself to transform the industry in ways even experts donÂ’t yet fully understand.

“I think it’s going to be ugly, but it’s going to be fun and I hope that you are going to be as excited about it as I am,” Philip Moeller, a commissioner with the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told participants at the Canadian Association of Members of Public Utility Tribunals conference in Montreal.

Consider, said Moeller, the revolutionary changes in the telecommunications industry. Before deregulation and the Internet and smartphones, North Americans had one kind of telephone and a service provider that set local and long distance rates.

Now, most families have land lines and at least a couple of mobile phones, various rate options and the opportunity to pay $2 a month for ring tones.

“What we see today in telecom would have been unimaginable” a couple of decades ago, Moeller said.

If he and other experts are correct, the smart-grid will also shift paradigms. People might one day find it difficult to recall when meter readers had to trudge through snow to do their job, or when hydro bills arrived in the mail offering a record of consumption that was 30 to 60 days old.

ItÂ’s not that CanadaÂ’s electricity grids are stupid. They just arenÂ’t as smart as they will soon be, says University of Alberta professor Joseph Doucet.

“In general, smart-grid means new applications, new technologies and new behaviours that will allow for better use of energy resources on the production, transportation and consumption sides,” said Doucet, who was also a speaker at the Montreal conference.

On the transportation and production sides of the grid, there are sophisticated technologies in place, but consumer donÂ’t see them. Smart meters should change that because they will be the interface between them and their energy supply.

A number of issues remain to be resolved — standards, communications protocols and security among them. But the smart grid is definitely in play.

Last October, U.S. President Barack ObamaÂ’s administration announced that $3.4 billion US would be invested in smart-grid efforts. Many of the grants approved involved smart-meter installations and initiatives. The British government has also announced plans to roll out 45 million smart meters for gas and electricity users by 2020.

Last month, B.C. announced that it would spend more than $900 million to supply smart meters to its 1.8 million customers. And Ontario is in the process of fulfilling an earlier pledge to install about 3.6 million smart meters by the end of 2011. They are already in place in a number of jurisdictions, including Ottawa and Toronto. And Quebec is wading into the waters with a tentative plan to start distributing them in 2012.

The first benefits from smart meters will be substantial improvements in energy efficiency, participants at the conference in Montreal heard.

When detailed information about energy consumption is provided, consumers can analyze their consumption and change their behaviour or unrecognized folly. One department store involved in a pilot project learned that it was leaving its parking lot lights on during the day while another company discovered that heaters used to melt snow along walkways were still on in the summer.

Details about consumption, coupled with dynamic pricing or time-of-use rates, allow utility consumers to take advantage of cheaper off-peak rates. Running your dishwasher late at night, for instance, will be less expensive than running it earlier in the day.

As rate programs become more sophisticated, consumers may get rebates for reducing power consumption, especially during critical peak periods such as sweltering hot summer days or frigid winter evenings when energy demands are high.

Businesses and innovators are already working on programs and applications that would allow consumers to take advantage of the smart meter by exploiting its ability to communicate. For instance, if you were to plug your smart appliances into wireless sensors before plugging them into electrical sockets, you could control them remotely.

So if you got an e-mail alert one hot July day advising rebates to customers if they immediately lower electricity consumption, you could telephone your fridge from the beach and ask it to cycle down for four hours. When and where that will happen first is unclear, but the wise bet is on jurisdictions where electricity rates are highest.

The exchanges between utilities, their customers and the intelligent grid will become more sophisticated and complicated if — or when — electric vehicles become commonplace, probably after 2030, Philip Hanser, of The Brattle Group, an international consulting firm, told the conference of utility regulators this week in Montreal.

There are many variables “and a huge potential going forward, but its success is not guaranteed,” he said.