NY Times on smart homes
Steve Lohr of the NY Times wrote a nice article about smart homes that will appear in tomorrow’s NY Times business section (April 23, 2015). The issue for residential efficiency efforts like this is that the savings are often small in absolute terms, and transaction costs can be high. In the aggregate, however, savings from millions of homes can add up fast.
My own view is that the biggest benefits from such technologies will be in making the grid more flexible and resilient, rather than yielding major energy savings for consumers. Here’s my quote in the article, surrounded by two other paragraphs, for context:
But the larger benefit of the new home technology may be beyond the home, as it contributes to the ecosystem of energy efficiency. Add up many household energy-saving steps at the right time, and peak loads for utilities are reduced, requiring less power generation. The cleanest, cheapest imaginable power plant is the one that is never built.
“If you can shift the load for a few hours on a summer day, that is a big deal to the utility company,” said Jonathan Koomey, a research fellow at the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University. “That’s where the big saving (sic) is going to be.”
Utilities across the country recognize the potential. Many are beginning to offer reward programs for households using their smart thermostats to curb energy use during peak hours and sometimes rebates for the purchase of Internet-connected thermostats from Nest, Honeywell, Ecobee and others.
See also our 2013 article in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources titled “Smart Everything”.
