Being a former telecommunications reporter, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Bell Canada, the country’s largest phone company, has spent the past two years designing a residential energy-management system as part of a consortium that includes Hewlett-Packard and CapGemini. The centrepiece of the system is a slick Web portal that consumers can use to remotely control the appliances (air con, pool pumps, hot water tank), lights and electronics in their home. Basically, the points you want to control are equipped with off-the-shelf wireless switches (or powerline switches) that communicate with a device connected to your home high-speed service. The device also communicates wirelessly with smart meters currently being installed in households across Ontario. Natural gas can also be controlled through wireless thermostats that control home and hot water temperature.

I won’t go into too much detail — you can read the story — but the system gives utilities a quick and simple way to communicate with customers during peak energy periods and get them to use less electricity through *spot* incentives. Milton Hydro outside of Toronto is launching a 250-home pilot this month and Bell hopes it will be enough to entice other utilities across Ontario, and eventually across North America, to adopt it. What’s cool is that I was speaking with one of the designers of Bell’s system and he said appliance makers such as GE are already preparing next-generation appliances that will have these wireless or powerline switches built directly into their products. A few years from now, online home energy management — another twist on the smart home — could be a reality. And I truly believe that, in Canada at least, it takes a company like Bell to get such a product to market. Here’s hoping the province supports such efforts.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Main Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.