What the Smart Grid Can Learn From Facebook Connect

Federating energy-saving applications could provide more secure privacy for consumers than aggregating them in the data flood that impends

By Celeste LeCompte

As social media has exploded, Web startups that build social applications are offering users ways to manage the proliferation. Some, such as FriendFeed, provide a central place for users to aggregate different services while others, like Facebook Connect, offer tools for federation—a single way to access them all. But the dilemma over whether it's better to aggregate or federate isn't confined to social media. Companies building out the smart grid and related infrastructure technologies are beginning to grapple with this question, too.

When it comes to carbon and energy data, the purchases we make and the resources we use constitute our de facto "profiles" in real-world networks such as utility grids, roadways, financial systems, and business supply chains. Energy and carbon management tools integrate information about our total energy usage from these profiles in an effort to cut our carbon footprints. As smart technologies provide increasingly amounts of data for these profiles, a Facebook Connect-like approach that uses federation rather than aggregation may be best-positioned to make energy and carbon management tools more effective without sacrificing user privacy.

The current generation of consumer-facing web tools for carbon footprinting and energy analysis largely take the aggregation approach. Users can input their personal information, or it can be automatically pulled in from a variety of accounts— utility bills and credit cards, for example—and organized into a single interface. As FriendFeed is to social networks, so these systems are to your energy data.

WattzOn, for example, aggregates information—some of it entered manually, some automatically gathered from select utilities (WattzOn hopes soon to include credit card partners as well)—analyzes the information and spits out graphs and social comparisons. Other services, such as Planet Metrics and Eps, take data from business systems software, sensors, and supply chains to analyze a business's carbon impacts in a single interface.

Paralysis by analysis

As stricter carbon-emissions regulations emerge to make businesses and utilities responsible for their own carbon impacts, the smart grid—and other smart infrastructure projects—will bring more sophisticated monitoring and analysis tools to market.

IBM's Smarter Planet initiative, for example, will provide detailed data sets about resource flows of traffic management, shipping and supply chain, water systems, and the power grid. Cisco has also begun to move into data-generating smart tools for the green-building market, while GE is taking its data-dependent smart appliances from deep, dark, corporate labs to the local hardware store. As data from these services piles up, federation tools may help make it actionable. That means utilities, cleantech startups, and their large IT providers are facing a data explosion that will make juggling social media accounts look easy.