Many countries are moving ahead with smart-grid technology, but New Zealand is lagging a little way behind.
Smart grids are electricity's buzzword, but, with the odd cold shower, we've felt their effects in our homes for decades.
The forerunner of energy's big hope was pioneered in New Zealand 60 years ago when ripple control was introduced to give power suppliers the ability to cut hot water heating
when demand stretched generation and transmission. This relatively crude, but "sensible grid" way of avoiding blackouts or brownouts, having to build more power stations and sling more lines to meet peak demand is still around today.
Though smart grid innovators and enthusiasts are bursting with ways to refine and expand the principle, a one-way pulse that turns off your hot water will remain the mainstay of controlling demand for a while yet.
It may be decades before most New Zealanders' appliances are having a two-way conversation through smart grids, whose definitions are almost as numerous as potential applications.
At its most basic it involves better communication between utility operators and components of the grid, including transformers, power lines, meters and even home appliances. Your fridge could turn itself on and off to take advantage of cheap power rates, or your solar panel or micro-windmill could feed surplus electricity back into the national grid - and the homeowner gets paid for it. On top of those alluring prospects, New Zealand's 1.7 million residential electricity consumers could adjust their use to prevent and ease peak power loads. Trials by Mercury Energy show householders who use up-to-the-minute data can cut their use by 10 per cent.
Across the country such savings could at least delay the need to build power stations and the associated infrastructure. Allowing for future spending on power stations is inflicting growing pain - by Contact Energy's reckoning it will push the energy component of bills from around 7c to between 10c and 12c a unit for all consumers over coming years.
Reliability of networks will also improve. Transmission lines and cables will be constantly monitored for signs of distress; already the health of critical lines is monitored as regularly as every half a metre.
Around the world tens of billions of dollars is being poured into building smart grids. In the United States - where networks are in worse shape than here - about $2.1 trillion must be spent on interstate grids.
The Obama administration is investing $4.5 billion in 100 smart grid projects, to be matched dollar for dollar by private funding by utilities.
Last month General Electric launched a 10-week contest to speed global power-grid upgrades, promising investment and marketing help for the best submissions from a $260 million fund.
The company estimates there is a $260 billion market for smart-grid technologies in the next decade. GE is spending about $10 billion on environmentally friendly products by 2015.
China is also at the forefront of the smart grid push and is now drafting a five-year energy plan to include smart grid technology as one of the key industries for research and development.
Its government will provide funding to build several research centres this year to develop transmission technology connecting wind and solar power to the grid.
State Grid Corp will invest the equivalent of $50 billion this year to build a smart grid network in China, Xinhua news agency reports. The company aims to install 75 electric car-charging stations and 6209 recharging towers across 27 cities this year, according to previous reports.
In Europe, an EU directive requires that 80 per cent of member state households be equipped with smart meters by the year 2020.
In Australia, Newcastle, will become the first Australian city to move towards being on a smart grid after a $120 million initial investment by the federal government announced in June. Parts of Sydney are also included in the trial project.
So what about New Zealand? The phrase "smart grid" barely rates a mention in the draft energy strategy released last month.
The document says the Government "will encourage industry participants to explore the opportunities offered by 'smart' meter, grid and appliance technologies".
However, much of the rest of the strategy relates to prime drivers of smart grids - conservation, efficiency and renewable energy. Most other countries are playing catch-up and like New Zealand will increasingly have to manage load to cope with extremes of weather.
Transpower provides the grunt for any smart grid. The high voltage network running the length of the country is undergoing a $5 billion rebuild following years of under-investment.
The state-owned enterprise's chief executive, Patrick Strange, says new technology being incorporated into massive modifications will result in a savvy national grid, but a complete smart grid is something that is decades away.
At the moment there is a "demand and must supply" system.
"The vast majority of the load - with the exception of ripple control hot water heating - is from demand, and the generation and transmission system must supply. There is no feedback mechanism."
Though it was increasingly important for some services in the house or business to have a 100 per cent power supply, others - it might be a fridge or some machinery - could be turned off for half an hour when not desperately needed and there would be no impact to the householder.
"We'd much much rather have the capacity through electronics and fibre to switch someone's fridge off and build slightly lighter grids. That sounds very easy and we've already poured millions into some of the platforms for this; we're planning for this," Strange says. "We're quite well advanced in aspects of it but it's not going to be a revolution, it's going to be an evolution."
With most big-scale renewable generation remote from cities' large transmission networks "unfortunately you still need wires to move that energy," but more effective load management offered economic efficiency, Strange says. "Are we going to see towers go away? No but what it might allow us to do is build slightly lighter grids."
Transpower is spending more than $250 million on a fast fibre phone network. "We have our own dedicated one because we need such fast switching - We see that as being one of the platforms for employing smart grid technology over the next 10 to 15 years, it's not going to come in overnight."
Mighty River Power's manager of consumer markets James Munro agrees that it will be decades before true smart grids are operating.
Retail arm Mercury Energy is more than halfway through a 250,000 smart meter rollout. Although meter readers are no longer required, the rollout is not yet paying for itself.
Mercury is about to launch another time-in-use study involving 500 households which will adapt pre-pay meter services to give more information about appliance consumption.
Munro says there is a danger of getting carried away with smart grid hype. Old-style pagers can be used to provide information on consumption instead of installing expensive interactive devices in the home to control meters.
Munro says there is no need to be pushing the smart grid pace for the sake of it. "New Zealand as a market is not big enough to define any of these outcomes - what we need to do is stay close to what's going on overseas and follow best of breed."
Pulse Utilities is a specialist meter and retail company and its chief executive, Dean Biddlecombe, is also not getting carried away. "Who is going to pay? From our experience the consumer is not prepared to pay a premium for metering."
]The company has scaled back the sophistication and cost of its meters for this reason.
Standard meters can cost as little as $30 but more sophisticated meters with the capability of talking to appliances cost up to $550, and these need to be paired with a an in-home visual display unit which costs about the same. Installation costs between $60 and $120.
There is as yet no international protocol to standardise chips in interactive devices that can communicate with appliances in what is a running VHS versus Beta-style debate.
"There are a whole lot of twists and turns in this game - a smart grid is a long way off."
