[amluto]

> If you pair a retail energy provider like Griddy with an advanced suite of home efficiency technology, like programmable or price-responsive thermostats, you can have a building that automatically tailors its energy usage to the market environment

One major piece of this puzzle that is, IMO, missing, is the lack of any reasonable, standardized way for a hypothetical smart home to communicate with the grid. With a smart meter, a properly ZigBee certified (why? probably some silly reason involving “security”) end user device can get current usage data from a smart meter. (And this data is blatantly wrong in any nontrivial circumstance.)

But and end-user device has no way to negotiate pricing or load reduction with the grid short of going through some intermediary on the Internet. If I want to program my house to reduce consumption when prices are high, I can’t.

An an example, a car should be able to tell the grid that it wants to buy x kWh at a maximum power of y kW between now and 5 AM, and the grid should be able to tell the car when to buy it. I don’t mean Tesla negotiating this on behalf of itself or its customers - I mean the car or the house talking to the meter or the utility. No unnecessary or unavoidable intermediaries please.

It doesn’t help that PG&E does not accurately know the topology of its own grid. Oops.