In a more general sense, there are a number of people doing home automation at various levels. Of course, the buzzword is the "Internet of Things", but that is getting played out in three realms:
- Automobiles (including Electric Vehicles)
- Health and Fitness
- Home Automation
Automobiles are getting interesting no so much for the vehicles themselves (and their batteries as a grid resource), but the notion that careful manipulation of the charge rate can be helpful for ancillary services. (Voltage & Frequency rise, charge the vehicle faster, Voltage & Frequency drop, slow the charge if you can.)
This is great, because it allows vehicle systems to participate in Demand Response in a useful way, without worrying the automakers about shortened battery life.
A lot of the Home Automation news is less hopeful. It seems that everyone expects to be able to provide DR services to Utilities "via the cloud". Some appliance manufacturers want to put everything into the cloud. Utilities have already been burned by cloud services, thanks. Need I remind y'all what happened when a prominent Solar provider (who was managing their installations "via the cloud") went belly up and turned off their servers? Yup, there's a lot of installed rooftop solar that is dead as the proverbial doornail, because there's no way anymore to tell the inverters to wake up and do something. This experience pretty much puts the kibosh on cloud-managed DR, and really hoses the idea of microgrids for reliability.
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