Smart Grid at the consumer-level has a long way to go
I live in Boulder, CO, the site of Xcel's pilot smart grid city project. It was a complete failure, and now Xcel is trying to recover its losses by increasing rates.
The city-wide smart grid installation entailed putting in place a fiber network to every residence and installing smart meters. For a city of 100,00, it was supposed to cost $15 million, but wound up costing $45 million. At some point it was supposed to involve putting some kind of smart grid devices on each major appliance to monitor power, but that never happened. There were always major concerns about security, and also the question of who was going to pay for these smart grid devices. For this failure and many other reasons, Boulder is now in the process of withdrawing from Xcel and forming its own power utility (the fiber network will likely go dark, a huge waste).
Any huge savings from smart grid can already be achieved by a little common sense. Buy something like a Kill-a-Watt meter which allows you to measure the energy use of each appliance. By putting the Kill-a-Watt on each appliance for a few days, you will quickly find any power hogs (hint: start with your DVRs and stereo equipment -- programming a Harmony remote to turn all that stuff off will reap huge savings). It doesn't take a genius to know that power is cheaper at night than during the day. If you need to know when the wind is blowing before running your washer, you can probably get a tweet from your power company. Cars are increasingly connected to the internet, so the power company could also tweet your car to tell it to start charging. And so on.
Smart grid will be useful at the utility level, to monitor the overall power grid. For the average home user, not so much.
