Texas Electricity Ratings stumbled across an interesting article this week discussing the use of “Smart Thermostats” and how TXU is rolling them out in some of their territories. The notion here is that, essentially, TXU is rolling out a Thermostat that will leverage a customer’s home broadband service to monitor their home electricity.
So what does that mean to the customer, exactly? Well, in short, imagine how Tivo operates, or those sometimes amusing DirecTV commercials where guys in the middle of a crisis set their DVR from their phone or laptop. This is a similar principle. The customer can log on and monitor their home electric usage. They can see what they’re using, and potentially how much it’s costing them, and they can adjust their electricity usage accordingly. If there’s peak times when costs are at the highest, a customer can program their thermostat to shut itself off for a 10 or 15 minute and then start back up again, prompting potentially substantial electricity savings.
Hats off the TXU for finding a new way to leverage technology to potentially give customers greater savings. This will act as an excellent stop-gap until (or even after) Oncor (and Centerpoint and all the rest) get their Smart Meter’s completely installed and functional throughout their footprints. Of course, any promise of cheap electricity typically comes with some kind of price, and this instance is no different. In this case, the cost is the broadband thermostat itself, which costs $75.