Intel gets personal about energy consumption management
If Intel has its way, its technology will soon be inside not just your personal computer but inside another piece of technology that is way more ubiquitous: the panel you use to control the heat or air-conditioning in your home or office.
This week, at the Intel Developer Forum in China, the company is showing off concept technology for controlling your personal energy combustion through a control panel that talks to sensors plugged in throughout your household and that could be accessed directly or over the internet. The sensors would keep tabs on electricity usage (basically what's on or off) and collect usage patterns. The data from your home would be anonymized and aggregated with similar data from buildings in your neighborhood or that are located in a similar climate, so you can see how your consumption compares to the norm.
Justin Rattner, Intel Senior Fellow, Corporate Vice President, director of Intel Labs of Intel AND Chief Technology Officer, is careful to characterize the technology as a concept right now, although Intel is exposing the idea to developers with the hope that they will begin working on applications. "Part of our objective is to illuminate, if you will," he says. Rattner presented his vision for personal energy management on April 14 in Beijing.
Other presentations this week will cover topics such as charging scenarios for electric cars. What happens, Rattner asks hypothetically, when everyone comes home in the evening and tries to charge their electric vehicle? Will it overload the grid? What storage solutions will exist for keep energy in reserve and can that excess capacity be "borrowed" at relevant junctures, such as a spike in demand.
Rattner says even if only 1 million of the 110 million to 115 million households in the United States made an effort to manage their personal energy consumption, the nation could avoid burning roughly 370,000 metric tons of coal. To put this further in perspective, that reduction would make the construction of 2 110-megawatt coal plants unnecessary, Rattner says. Intel believes between 15 percent and 30 percent of the nation's energy consumption could be directly impacted through the use of the technology.
Where might this technology show up? If you think about it, energy management might become relevant for things like set-top boxes or televisions. Kind of like vPro, but for your consumer electronics devices. Rattner says the possibilities live in Intel partners' business imagination and that's one reason for the focus this week. Another area where Intel could play a role, he says, is in the development of interoperability standards.
Stay tuned, as I'm sure some of the other large players in consumer electronics and embedded technologies are walking down parallel paths.