Comments on: When Smart Grid Meets Smart Home

By: Tristan Nisley

Tristan Nisley — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 22:31:35 +0000

network thermostats are awesome. Now there is no problem if i forget leaving the AC turned on.

By: Nuno Almeida

Nuno Almeida — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 07:54:39 +0000

Interesting article, but somehow I think it will be outdated very quickly. We at NourishCare have been developing sensing strategies and intelligence to be able to monitor an elderly person without giving any private information away. All we do is learn patterns of normality, and take action when we detect significant deviation away from those patterns. Data security is of massive importance to us and solving it has been at the centre of our product design strategy.

I believe that we’re once again, as individuals, having to make choices. And in that process having to balance the pros of having access to innovative functionality and convenience, versus the cons of living with the risk of being spied on. Companies like our can only do everything we can to minimise that risk.

Another related trend is the apparent erosion of the value associated to privacy. The benefits of services such as online banking, mobile payments and Facebook sharing, for most people, greatly outweigh the potential risks. So, as technology advances and people become more aware of the advantages and possibilities, there is a very high likelihood that people will adopt them.

By: Brittany Coday

Brittany Coday — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 05:26:24 +0000

Nice. Thanks for putting up this. It is always awesome to see someone help out the world.

By: admin

admin — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 21:57:05 +0000

I’ve been toying around with the idea of artificial earthworms that could gnaw their way through landfills and extract anything usable, turning waste dumps into usable land. My thinking is that former landfills will someday become the most valuable land in a city, once the natural resources can be efficiently and invisibly extracted

By: David Long

David Long — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:49:37 +0000

One of the ideas that keeps nagging at the back of my mind when you wrote about home outputs is if we could scale down Joseph Longo’s Plasma Converter to a household size unit. What extraordinary environmental savings could we have if a homes trash disposal took place at the home itself. Think of the savings in both cost and environmental impacts if there was no need to actually pick up the normal household trash. In addition, the generation of surplus power could be routed back into the power grids for localized needs. Just as a thought experiment, try stringing together the following technologies – the plasma trash convertor, Dean Kamen’s water purification system, stirling engine power generator operating off stored syngas, excess power back to the electrical grid.

By: David Thomas

David Thomas — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:48:02 +0000

I think that portions of the vision as described above will likely become a reality. That said, one concern that comes to mind is that of privacy. If my house is smart enough to know when I am there, and what I am doing, and it is hooked up to a network, then all the infrastructure is in place for me to be easily spied on. Could be government officials, or even hackers that would potentially know when I go to bed, when I get up, what I watch on TV, how much time I spend with various hobbies (such as working on a car in the garage or playing video games), whether I like the rooms cool or warm, what sort of music I listen to, what I eat, and on and on…

In many ways, the privacy we would potentially give up in a smart home would be a continuation of the privacy we have already been giving up without much fuss. We routinely give up a bit of privacy in exchange for a discount whenever we use a discount card at a grocery store. Credit card companies routinely monitor our purchases and as such, know a great deal about us. And our internet habits can easily be revealed to law-enforcement or other government officials, or even to hackers. So the potential loss of privacy in a smart home would just be a further step down a road we have been going down for a while.

By: John s. Lands

John s. Lands — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:32:38 +0000

One question that I would like to add to the discussion is the level of government interaction in the interface you described. The government likely will want to establish the standards which may in turn mean that they may want to establish the controls. I believe that it is important for the people involved in these activities to provide sufficient protections for the consumer from unnecessary or arbitrary intrusion. I will be more comfortable with independent organizations like IEEE providing the standards and then have all of the manufacturers follow them for economic reasons rather than political reasons.

By: nanotürkiye

nanotürkiye — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 21:30:10 +0000

Thank you for your explanation of parts of smart homes. It really makes huge difference when you think of houses as a system, which has inputs, outputs, inventories. We generally think of factories in this way.

But I could not get the answer to your question at the beginning of the post. How do you think grid interface will change in coming years? Is it achievable?