Posted by: JaredFurtado on Oct 31, 2011

By: Jeff St. John

San Diego Gas & Electric and GE look at smart appliances for apartments, and California utilities promise customers a “green button” for standardized energy data.

We’ve got some interesting ideas coming out of California’s utilities, including one aimed at converting San Diego apartment buildings into big smart-grid surrogates.

At this week’s Smart Energy International conference in San Francisco, San Diego Gas & Electric’s smart grid chief Lee Krevat dropped the news that his utility had placed a big order for smart appliances to put in new apartment buildings, with plans to start plugging them in next year.

I caught up with him afterwards and got some more details. General Electric is the key partner, and plans to supply its Nucleus home energy manager to property owners interested in installing some smart appliances -- smart thermostats, smart refrigerators and other such controllable loads -- in their newly built rental units, he said.

The idea is to make thermostats, fridges and other household power loads available for programs like automated demand response, or to make them responsive to the critical peak pricing SDG&E wants to start implementing for residential customers next year, Krevat said. While he wouldn’t say whose smart appliances would be going into the buildings, GE does make appliances that would fit the bill.

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