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The way I see it, the appeal is to our love of gadgets and our desire for technology to make our lives better. Clever marketing of these products can also go a
by glitcher 11y ago
The way I see it, the appeal is to our love of gadgets and our desire for technology to make our lives better. Clever marketing of these products can also go a long way towards convincing us of their potential, while in practice we're now seeing a lot of problems people may have not considered when first purchasing these products.
Personally, I do have interest in a thermostat that can learn how to be more energy efficient for the sake of saving me money. But I don't think that requires Internet connectivity at all.
And it is beyond me why anyone would want or need an Internet connected toaster or coffee maker as well.
- greglindahl 11y agoThere are a couple of ways that connectivity can save everyone money: 1) Peak shaving. The utility pays homeowners to be able to change the temperature slightly during peak electrical load. 2) Short term adjustment. One challenge of integrating large amounts of wind and solar into a grid is that sometimes you get short-term fluctuations in power generation. Smoothing these fluctuations out by turning off a bunch of residential AC units can be very cost effective. Utilities are willing to pay consumers in both of these situations. And both of these work better with 2-way connectivity. Looking forward, if electric cars become more popular, it's likely that they'll have smart chargers which will optimize when overnight or at-work charging takes place.