Submitted by EnergyTechStocks.com

Journey into the future of energy with Eliot Assimakopoulos, an alternative energy technology expert at General Electric Global Research, and you discover that what’s in GE’s world today sounds like it will be in your world tomorrow.

First stop is your house. It is equipped with a GE device now in development called the “Envirodashboard,” the purpose of which is to save you money and help you to be “green” at the same time. With this one “smart” instrument, you monitor and stay in control of how much energy and water you consume, as well as the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions you generate. Just by pressing a button you can save money by, for instance, raising the thermostat a degree or two or by timing the start of the dishwasher to take advantage of lower evening electric rates. You also can interface with the solar photovoltaic equipment you may well have on your house, maximizing your consumption of emissions-free solar power, maybe even earning a buck or two by programming it so that your local electric utility can utilize any excess solar power you have on a hot summer afternoon when system-wide demand is spiking.

Assimakopoulos emphasized in an interview that a lot of other changes will have to occur before this and other GE visions become reality. The “common element” in the future of energy, he emphasized, is an “enabling set of technologies” that will make the electric power grid “smart,” transforming it from analog to digital so that it resembles a phone network in terms of functionality. Indeed, in the future these two networks likely will work closely together, based on Assimakopoulos’ statement that GE customers want the Envirodashboard to be controllable from a cell phone.

To be sure, programmable thermostats already are on the market. But GE’s all-in-one approach, combining water with electricity and also enabling GHG to be tracked, promises to simplify the process by which people understand the value (financial and environmental) of becoming more energy and water efficient and more reliant on non-polluting renewable energy. Last week Reuters reported that a GE energy finance unit executive believes solar, wind and other sources of renewable energy (excluding hydropower) could double or even quadruple their presence in the United States in the next 10 years. The executive added that GE has so far put $6 billion into renewable energy investments, with $2 billion more to be invested by 2010.

Still, as Assimakopoulos emphasized at a recent environmental summit in Hawaii, the key to changing nations’ energy and water consumption patterns will be consumer education. The Envirodashboard would appear to have the potential to make consumer education pretty simple, which could make it the gold standard in technology for optimizing home energy efficiency.