Jan 19 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Michael Milstein The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.


If you could save energy, would you?

A new generation of home energy monitors and intelligent appliances that can respond to signals from the grid, saving power when it's priciest, are slowly creeping into homes in the Pacific Northwest. They may now be only a few years away from becoming commonplace, utility leaders and energy efficiency experts say.

They will give consumers more power over their power. The question is how quickly consumers will adopt them and start using them.

Super-efficient Energy Star appliances have already become the standard in new homes. The next step is to adjust the way the appliances behave -- when they burn power and when they don't -- in ways that save both energy and money.

For instance, clothes dryers might get a signal to switch off their heating elements when energy is at a premium -- continuing to tumble clothes -- and then back on when demand eases. Air conditioners might wait a few minutes before cycling back on -- although consumers could override the delays if they want to.

Right now many dishwashers have delay features, allowing users to set them to run in the middle of the night when electricity is plentiful. But few people use that feature, said Mike Beyerle, a marketing manager at General Electric. A "smart" dishwasher could do that on its own, or at the signal of a utility trying to control power demands.

"What we're finding is that people will accept the delay," he said. "They don't oppose it. They just don't want to deal with it themselves."

He says it's likely that within a few years, such intelligent appliances will be as commonplace as energy-saving Energy Star appliances are today. It may mean a shift in behavior for people, too: for instance, people might spread their laundry over a few days, accommodating their dryer's slower schedule, rather than a single "laundry day."

They wouldn't necessarily have to, but doing so could save them money.

The more "smart appliances" appear in homes, the more could respond to signals to ease up on their power consumption at key peak times when electricity is at a premium. That would make the whole energy grid smarter and more efficient, and help utilities such as Portland General Electric avoid building new generators that burn fossil fuel and emit greenhouse gases.

"Instead of building a power plant to serve those few hours of peak demand, we'd rather work with customers to limit the demand," said Joe Barra, PGE's director of customer energy resources.

It takes a step toward the "Smart Grid" concept promoted by President-elect Barack Obama, to make the national energy system make better use of increasingly stretched power supplies.

"A Smart Grid has little or no value without smart appliances attached to it," said Tom Reddoch, executive director of energy utilization at the Electric Power Research Institute. He said the main hurdle is standardizing systems so smart appliances all understand a common language.

Right now digital monitors that cost around $100 and sit on your kitchen counter can tell you exactly how much electricity you're burning at any given moment, and how much it's costing you. The idea is that knowledge is -- quite literally -- power and that you'll behave accordingly when you can watch a kind of odometer for your home. When you see your money ticking away because you left the lights on, you'll be more careful about turning them off.

"When you have the water heater on, you're less likely to leave the water running when you're doing the dishes," said Nick O'Neil, a planning engineer at Energy Trust of Oregon, who has had one of the monitors in his home for close to a year.

Energy Trust offered more than 100 of the monitors to residential energy customers for the discounted rate of only $30 and most were snapped up in less than an hour. Energy Trust has no more, but they can be purchased online at www.bluelineinnovations.com.

So-called "smart homes," where appliances operate automatically or respond to a button on your cell phone have been on the horizon for years. But what might finally make them reality is the increasing drive to save energy and not build power plants that contribute additional greenhouse gases. More utilities are moving toward "tiered pricing" -- charging more for power at times of peak demand.

"When people are faced with the prospect of having higher electric bills, they will look for ways to save," said Beyerle of General Electric, which is introducing new smart appliances this year. "The big motivations are going to be energy cost and energy scarcity."

Many appliances have some of the needed intelligence built into them. It's a small step for a dishwasher to go from deciding how much grime there is on dishes to deciding when to back off energy consumption, said Carl Imhoff, who manages the commercial energy market sector at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash. The laboratory has run pilot tests of smart appliances in Portland and Washington's Olympic Peninsula and found that 80 percent to 90 percent of homeowners liked the technology and would use it again.

About 10 percent of power generation capacity and 25 percent of smaller distribution lines, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is used only about 400 hours a year -- those times of peak demand, such as cold snaps or heat waves, when electricity is in intense demand, he said. That makes such power especially expensive to bring online.

"If you can just take advantage of a little bit of intelligence in the appliance, it can sometimes be cheaper and greener than the alternative of bringing new generation online," Imhoff said.

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