Duke Energy Corporation will be rolling out smart meters to consumers in a new initiative. This new initiative also includes rolling out solar panels, wind turbines and solar thermal water heaters to some homes.
The installation of the smart meters will affect around 800,000 homes in Indiana. Duke Energy is also moving forward with smart meter technology in part of North Carolina as well.
Other states that have smart metering projects include California, Colorado and Florida. In fact, this week a technician from Southern California Edison, which services my home installed a new meter.
I spoke with the technician about the new meter tying into Edison’s smart metering system and it looks very promising. The feature that sounds most encouraging to me is that homeowners will be able to logon to the Internet and see which appliances in their homes are using the most electricity.
I’m the kind of person who would like to see that my Energy Saver appliances are living up to expectations and be able to gauge and make behavioral adjustments on how to more efficiently conserve energy.