The meter at your home or apartment recording your electricity consumption is one of the portals to a clean energy future — and to consumers spending considerably less on their power bills. But to get to that future, those meters must be able to provide up-to-the-minute data to you, your utility company, the plug-in devices in your home and the growing array of businesses that can analyze the data and help you save on your electricity bills. For that to happen, though, your energy data must be available in a standard format. The Biden administration had the chance to accelerate that transition last fall when it awarded a little more than $1 billion in “smart grid grants” to nearly three dozen electric utilities to improve the efficiency of the power grid. As a condition of the grants, the Energy Department should have required those utilities to provide electric meter data in a “portable” format so the information could move easily among different software applications, platforms and services.

---

Persons: Biden Organizations: Energy Department