A switch is in the works

MILTON, Ontario — The glowing amber dot on a light switch in the entryway of George Tsapoitis’ house offers a clue about the future of electricity.

A few times this summer, when millions of air conditioners strain the Toronto region’s power grid, that pencil-tip-sized amber dot will blink. It will be asking Tsapoitis to turn the switch off — unless he’s already programmed his house to make that move for him.

This is the beginning of a new way of thinking about electricity, and the biggest change in how we get power since wires began veining the landscape a century ago.

For all the engineering genius behind the electric grid, that vast network ferrying energy from power plants through transmission lines isn’t particularly smart when it meets our homes. We flip a switch and generally get as much power as we’re willing to pay for.

But these days the environmental consequences and unfriendly economics of energy appear unsustainable. As a result, power providers and technology companies are making the electric grid smarter.

It will stop being merely a passive supplier of juice. Instead, power companies will be able to cue us to make choices about when and how we consume power. And most likely, we’ll have our computers and appliances carry out those decisions for us.

The smarter grid should reduce the need for new power plants, which we pay off in our monthly electric bills. However, if people fail to react properly to conservation signals, their bills could spike.

And certainly a smart grid that can encourage us to conserve will feel different. Envision your kitchen appliances in silent communication with their power source: The fridge bumps its temperature up a degree on one day, and the dishwasher kicks on a bit later on another.

Smart-grid technologies have gotten small tests throughout North America. But there’s little doubt that more is coming. The utility Xcel Energy Inc. plans to soon begin a $100 million smart grid project reaching 100,000 homes in Boulder, Colo.

In Milton, Tsapoitis uses his computer to visit an online control panel that configures his home’s energy consumption. He chooses its temperature and which lights should be on or off at certain times of the day. He can set rules for different kinds of days, so the house might be warmer and darker on summer weekdays when his family is out.

The family can override those changes manually. But if midnight comes and no one has remembered to lower the thermostat and turn off the porch light, those steps just happen.

These little tweaks have added up nicely for another person testing the Milton system, Marian Rakusan. He’s saved at least $300 on utility bills since the program began in September. Tsapoitis and his wife, Lisa, aren’t certain of their savings.

This alone is not revolutionary – programmable thermostats and other “smart home” controls already let people craft similar resource-saving plans. The big change is the combination of these controls with that blinking amber light on the switch — where the grid talks back.

Milton’s local gas and electricity retailer, Direct Energy, will set those amber dots blinking in an emergency, like when a power plant is down for maintenance. Or it could happen when air conditioners overwhelm electric capacity.

Whatever the cause, at that moment, this section of the grid needs a reduction in demand, fast, or else outages loom.

People in Milton’s test are expected to configure a “brownout” setting on their computers, indicating how their homes should respond in such a situation. In this test, Direct Energy also will enforce conservation remotely. It can raise the set temperature in a participant’s home by nearly 4 degrees Fahrenheit, reducing its air conditioning load. The company also can shut off the testers’ hot-water heaters and electric pool pumps for up to four hours.

Rakusan says he’s not sure he likes the idea of the power company tweaking his home’s settings, and it appears many people share that qualm. California officials recently had to back away from a proposal to require remote-controlled thermostats in new buildings.

So a more likely scenario is that consumers will get powerful economic incentives to make those decisions themselves.

Typically we pay a flat rate for electricity. In a growing number of places, rates move slightly higher in busiest hours.

In a test this summer in 1,100 Baltimore homes, households will pay the cheapest, “off-peak” rates most of the time. Some testers will pay higher rates every weekday afternoon. And all of them will be subject to “critical peak” periods of even higher charges, declared on as many as 12 weekday afternoons with stress on the grid.

The Maryland homes each will get small orbs that will glow different colors to indicate the price of electricity.

There’s only one problem. “Consumers are not sitting at home waiting for the latest signal from the power grid,” says Rob Pratt, a scientist with the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash. So appliances designed to interact with the smarter electric grid will have to adjust themselves.

Pratt’s lab has already built and tested controllers that can make it happen. And over the next decade, Pratt expects homes to get appliance controls with a sliding scale. At one end people could choose something like “maximize my ease and comfort.” At the other, “save me the maximum amount of money.” The highest-conservation settings might lead dishwashers to start only when electricity prices are at their lowest, or when wind power has kicked on.

When Pratt and colleagues tested aspects of this in 112 homes in Washington state, they determined the average household’s electricity bills would drop 10 percent.