I am not ignorant on how to save energy. Last year my company reduced energy use in more than 28K small businesses and 6,800 homes. In a previous business my team reduced energy usage 20% in 1,000 large buildings using real time data.

The people who are pushing more real time data, are in the business of data not efficiency. If you want the data go buy TED. It’s cheap.

I sell solutions that reduce energy usage. If I thought more real time data or an edict from the President would drive me more business, wouldn’t I be for it? But proposals like the Markey bill will cause a lot of people to spend a lot of money on real time data access with limited results. It disintermediates what the thoughtful utilities are trying to do, which may cause them to revert to doing nothing in energy efficiency, is that good?

Things like 15min interval data (in residential) does not solve the problem. If you want to analyze a building to get to the real issues you need to sample down at 15khz (yes that is 15,000 times a second). Practically, we do not know the right and best way to gather data that effects change at scale in residential, so we should not set a national policy until innovators deliver.

TOU is just another game for high cost energy in markets with low reserve margin. The bulk of CO2 comes from base load. I don’t need a meter to tell me to install a 19seer air conditioner, CFLs, etc. And once these systems are in, I don’t need to stare at Google Power meter to learn more. Normal people want to live their life, not stare at goats.

Before we go spend several billions more, maybe we should actually do some real scientific study on what drives people to adopt persistent energy efficiency measures. For example, pre-pay meters provide a simple status signal (Yellow/Red light) and drive 15% reduction in energy usage – no interval data required.

The future of smart-grids isn’t going to be centralised, it’s going to be driven by a device that sits where wall-plugs (or light-fittings etc) normally sit – but is remotely controllable, and which feeds information back to the user’s wifi router.

The data will be collected by the second rather than by the minute/hour… and the primary interest will be the lazy/cool factor… for people to turn off the lights without having to get their fat arses up off the sofa, or check that they haven’t left the gas on, after they’ve left the house. To turn on the lights (and the cameras) in the garage if they hear a noise out there at night.

The secondary interest is that they’ll be able to see (graphically – with a proper, over-friendly Web 2.0 style graphical interface) how much energy is being used at any given point… with the ability to click off anything not needed…. without having to get out of bed. It will all be doable from their cellphone or laptop, or any other device capable of receiving/displaying etc.

Combine this with micro-generation (eg: Nanosolar, Konarka et al)… I think we’ll get to a point where people are going to say “ok, I can jump from here”… and rather than using The National Grid as a backup, using a little petrol/biomass generator instead.

So… similar to the way that the web is creating the means for people to simply route around the music/film industry… I think it’s going to happen with energy as well.