Whether it is good for average consumers is one thing, but the upcoming smart grid (in the US, and probably later in Europe as well) is going to be an interesting development for data centers as well. Even so much that it is not a utility thing anymore, but mainly an IT thing. That is further reinvorced by the fact that Vint Cerf is a member of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP).

However, the smart grid has one serious problem which other IT project don't have to cope with, according to CTO Dan Woods of Evolved Technologist in a column for Forbes. That problem is the somewhat slow moving world of utilities. Smart meters are surely being installed, but many of the utilities are not moving to make any use of the real potential that the smart grid has; they only turn on the option of reporting back usages, and that's it. Users (and consequently data centers) are in danger of not seeing any benefit from the use of smart meters. They might even see it as a nuisance.

Therefore, as Woods and Cerf argue, it is needed to come up with a playground of sorts to explore the full potential of the smart grid. A consortium of sorts. That would solve four problems, Woods writes: exploration of more data sources (not just those coming from the utilities), a wider group would become involved in designing the smart grid, prototypes will pop up (and with that new ideas and standards) and finally, a breakdown in organisational silos could be a positive consequence of all the new ideas.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Especially as we as consumers and large users don't want utilities to use the smart grid only for their own gains.

In the Netherlands we have another, completely different project which went that path. Dutch people will be familiar with the horror I am referring to: the public transport chip card. There, public transport were about the only ones who were having any say on how to deploy the system. The result is traveller nuisance, high costs, infringement on basic privacy premises and most importantly: a smart system that is extremely dumb.