I think the next big theme right now is energy. From generation to storage to consumption were going to rethink how we deal with it. Right now our pricing model is broken due to government regulation but I think the coming energy crisis will push utilities to use spot rate metering like Texas has already started in places.
Spot rate metering will finally make iot (formally known as the internet of shit) actually make sense as many of appliances can store energy while it’s cheap and dispense while it’s expensive (fridge, ac, water heater, even house heat). This will really help level load the grid and allow us to do more with existing capacity
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say the last thing I want is for my local power grid to become a low regulation real time market. We've seen the flaws of the Texas approach, and doubling down on it with a sprinkling of IOT tech on top is not gonna go anywhere good.
Not to mention the fact that IoT consumes lots of unnecessary power and stuff like Nest that tries to "conserve energy with AI" ends up consuming more power for an ultimately shittier experience than simply manually managing the system.
I suspect since there's money to extract and profit for the power companies, this will happen anyway in the next 5-10 years across the USA. I'm already bracing for the internet providers to start the same bullshit, claiming that the pipes are getting clogged at peak times...
Yeah, where I'm at my choices are basically Comcast and Century Link, both of them not companies I'm eager to do business with.
Comcast has been playing games around overage charges for a few years now. It's pretty transparently calibrated to ding you if you have more than one person regularly streaming 4k video.
We need to stop thinking about power and bandwidth on a per unit basis. There are times when it’s free someone’s you might even get paid to burn it and others when it’s super expensive.
As for nest I agree it’s a shit experience and actually ends up peak loading the grid.
Not to mention the fact that a lot of people cannot just replace their existing appliances with newer IoT stuff just because, especially in this economy.
I agree that it’s going to be painful. But it’s going to be painful either way because power plants take too long to build and we have an energy crunch now. We need to get power from somewhere and the only immediate solution is to level load the grid more efficiently.
I do not think this is something that will make our lives better but it will make more efficient use of our existing power infrastructure and its something we will all have to deal with
