There 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 slightl

There 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.