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When his household electric bill rose recently, Troy Batterberry blamed his wife for leaving the lights on, only to discover later that the real culprit was a leaky refrigerator. Batterberry isn’t likely to make that mistake again—and not just because of family happiness. As Microsoft’s product unit manager for energy management and home automation, Batterberry is a captain in the company’s race with Google and other information technology (IT) giants to develop home area networks (HANs) in which sensors in appliances continuously monitor energy consumption and feed this data to a smart meter (for communication with the utility) or other intelligent display device. Batterberry said Microsoft’s near-term goal for its Hohm software is energy conservation—enabling people to track and manage their energy use. The company’s long-term vision is to automate home maintenance and provide such other services as security. For customers, HANs have the potential for terrific cost savings and convenience, but they and their first cousins BANs (building area networks, covering commercial customers) present a huge strategic challenge for electric utilities. These networks will create a tidal wave of data—a utility will have to collect, store, and analyze this huge amount of information, as well as protect the data against hackers, maintain the integrity of the system, and use the data to help customers and to strengthen the utility’s relationship with them. At the same time, it will have to deal with legal and ethical questions surrounding the circumstances under which outside parties such as Microsoft can make money by mining a customer’s personal information without violating his or her privacy. Indeed, utilities and regulators have to address the basic question of who owns the data in the first place—the utility, the vendor whose equipment generates them, or the customer.
When his household electric bill rose recently, Troy Batterberry blamed his wife for leaving the lights on, only to discover later that the real culprit was a leaky refrigerator. Batterberry isn’t likely to make that mistake again—and not just because of family happiness. As Microsoft’s product unit manager for energy management and home automation, Batterberry is a captain in the company’s race with Google and other information technology (IT) giants to develop home area networks (HANs) in which sensors in appliances continuously monitor energy consumption and feed this data to a smart meter (for communication with the utility) or other intelligent display device. Batterberry said Microsoft’s near-term goal for its Hohm software is energy conservation—enabling people to track and manage their energy use. The company’s long-term vision is to automate home maintenance and provide such other services as security.
For customers, HANs have the potential for terrific cost savings and convenience, but they and their first cousins BANs (building area networks, covering commercial customers) present a huge strategic challenge for electric utilities. These networks will create a tidal wave of data—a utility will have to collect, store, and analyze this huge amount of information, as well as protect the data against hackers, maintain the integrity of the system, and use the data to help customers and to strengthen the utility’s relationship with them. At the same time, it will have to deal with legal and ethical questions surrounding the circumstances under which outside parties such as Microsoft can make money by mining a customer’s personal information without violating his or her privacy. Indeed, utilities and regulators have to address the basic question of who owns the data in the first place—the utility, the vendor whose equipment generates them, or the customer.