In case you did not realize that the Broadband Plan had anything to do with energy management in homes and buildings, here are a couple of quotes from the Plan:

One of the most important and cost-effective ways to meet national energy goals is to encourage energy efficiency in homes and businesses—but end-users need better information in order to maximize energy and cost savings.

And

A national Smart Grid policy should encourage tens of thousands of entrepreneurs to innovate—using new technologies and business models—to create a wide variety of in-building energy management and information services. Making energy data available to customers and their authorized third parties, while employing open and non-proprietary standards, is the best way to unleash this vast potential for innovation.⁵⁷ The history of the Internet illustrates how entrepreneurs can develop disruptive applications, attract investment capital and compete to deliver value to customers—thereby driving innovation, economic growth and job creation.

Here are the kinds of things the regulatory push under the Plan intends to foster.

Here is the text that goes with the images:

It is a blistering hot summer day. You have just arrived at work and realize that you forgot to turn off your home air conditioning, which is blowing full blast. In the past there was nothing you could do until you returned home. But today there are new mobile applications (“apps”) that allow you to take action anytime, anywhere.

There are already dozens of apps on smartphones, computers and other devices dedicated to home energy measurement and management. Companies such as Visible Energy, Control4 and many others offer apps that let you monitor your energy consumption and control your lights, security system, entertainment system and thermostat from the comfort of your living room couch or a remote location.

These applications are not just for early adopters with high-end home automation systems. Socially minded or cost-conscious consumers who want to better track their energy use can use online sites like Microsoft’s Hohm and Google’s PowerMeter.

The Plan makes a number of recommendations for regulatory action related to consumer applications. My favorite is 12.7 which reads as follows:

States should require electric utilities to provide consumers access to, and control of, their own digital energy information, including real-time information from smart meters and historical consumption, price and bill data over the Internet. If states fail to develop reasonable policies over the next 18 months, Congress should consider national legislation to cover consumer privacy and the accessibility of energy data.

My point with this and some of my other Broadband posts is that the Feds are just getting cranked up to promulgate all sorts of rules and regulations across all sorts of industries – in point of fact, anything that uses or could use a broadband connection will be impacted. 

In the smart-grid space the Feds are leaning towards open standards, using the internet as a model and hoping to spark innovation and creativity. I agree that open standards are the way to go, but the battle remains to be fought. I suspect that there will be other interests. If you are making a bet with your start-up, you should be watching this unford. Whichever direction the Feds go in will affect you as well as a vast and increasingly important industry.