Smart Grids and Big Brothers

Today, in the New York Times was a small article that Google is getting involved in metering power.  All the rage among energy conservation folks is the idea of "smart grids."  Quite simplistically, a smart grid is one that is centrally controlled and in a sense pulses energy when needed.  For instance, it would increase energy over, say, high power tension wires, when all the lights are on in Las Vegas (wait, bad example, those lights are on day or night), ok, when the lights are on in Portland, Oregon.  But the smart grid would reduce power when the lights are off.  

A smart grid is also on a micro level.  Apparently, appliance manufacturers have been installing chips in the gorgeous stainless steel dishwasher you bought two years ago that sends a signal to your utility when you're washing the dishes.  How the smart grid would work is the utility would control when your dishwasher was running, not you.  So, essentially, all the power sucking dishwashers would not be running at the same time in a certain grid sector.  

First, there is a little bit of irony in Google's entry into this large scale power conservation.  Of course, they see a way to monetize the monitoring of power usage, your electrical meter perhaps being connected to the Internet...anyway, here is a company whose products are all web based, thus requiring enormous use of power in their servers.  Google, along with Microsoft and Yahoo are scouring the Pacific Northwest (think cheap federally subsidized power) for real estate near dams along the Columbia River to locate their huge server farms.  So, perhaps the deal is that if we all conserve energy there will be more for the server farms?

Ok, that said, here is my other concern: there is a chip in my appliances?  Now, I haven't bought a new appliance in years (imagine my surprise when I finally bought a refrigerator and a light went on as I opened the door!) so no one in the world knows when I run my dishwasher.  But for an old-school girl like me, the idea that there are chips installed in appliances that could communicate with my utility company is more than disconcerting.  Imagine the kinds of mischief law enforcement can get into once it gets its hands on the data, among other concerns.

However, having said that, our "new new economy" will rely on power generated by hydroelectricity, coal, and indeed, nuclear power (yes, everyone take a big gulp,but the reality is there are only so many rivers in North America that we can ruin by constructing dams).  The big surge to produce electric cars, which use enormous amounts of electricity as well as the server farms (for all those devotees of cloud computing), will require some trafficking of the power grids that we have now and will construct over the next few years (watch for many many lawsuits over the eminent domain of large swathes of land for transmission corridors).  Perhaps allowing utilities to make choices when to surge and conserve power is in the long run, wise.

Nonetheless, I do believe we need to have a discussion about those chips inside our dishwashers.  They seem like an uninvited guest to the dinner party.