learn from America’s smart meter mistake

In 2009, experts thought they had the solution to America’s household energy waste: smart meters.

“Smart meters will allow you to actually monitor how much energy your family is using by the month, by the week, by the day, or even by the hour,” President Barack Obama proclaimed that same year, heralding the U.S. government’s $3.4 billion Smart Grid grants.

Now, nearly a decade later, if you judged smart meters by their ubiquity, you’d think the initiative was a success. More than half of American homes now have smart meters, with deployments set to top 70 million by the end of 2016. But household energy use trends tell a different story. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, residential energy consumption has remained roughly unchanged since 2009.

So why haven’t smart meters cut consumption? The reason becomes rather obvious when you look at these early-bird Internet of Things products. They offer up useful information — but only if the user actually goes looking for it. And the problem is that users simply aren’t: The Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative found just 8 percent of Americans use their energy company’s online energy analysis tools.