Who killed the networked fridge?

Posted on November 8, 2008
Filed Under Semantic Web | 1 Comment

One of most memorable parts of the Euro IA conference was Adam Greenfield’s comment during his keynote regarding the networked fridge.

“Unless anyone here works for Philips, I’m fairly certain that nobody in this room wants or will ever buy a networked fridge.”

http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2008/09/euroia2008_part1.php

Fair point but I wanted to revisit the concept with regard to the big challenge of this century; climate change and energy conservation. Thomas Friedman’s book Hot, Flat and Crowded is a nice summary of some of the issues and possible solutions.

The problem:
If we continue on our current path CO2 levels will double (to 560ppm) around the mid-century and will triple by 2075. A situation we have not been in for 650,000 years. We don’t know what it will be like to live in a 560ppm CO2 world let alone an 800ppm one.

“So now we have a target: We want to avoid the doubling of CO2 by mid-century, to do it we need to avoid emission of 200 billion tons of carbon as we grow between now and then.”

Thomas Friedman

Solutions:
Freidman identifies a number of targets that need to be met. One of them is to cut electricity use in homes, offices, and stores by 25%. A way that this might be achieved according to Friedman is to become more intelligent about energy use and the development of an Energy Internet. Energy distribution and consumption is currently stuck in the 50’s and has failed to embrace the IT revolution.

The concept of an Energy Internet was originally conceived in an Economist article:

“Energy visionaries imagine a “self-healing” grid with real-time sensors and “plug and play” software that can allow scattered generators or energy-storage devices to attach to it. In other words, an energy internet.”

http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_NQSGJRR

Amongst other things this would mean more intelligent appliances in the home that can negotiate their energy needs with the grid as well as communicating to the homeowner the worst offenders in growing energy bills. Friedman imagines what it might be like to live with a smart grid.

“..an Energy Internet in which every device – from light switches to air conditioners, to basement boilers, to car batteries and power lines and power stations – incoporate microchips that could inform your utility of the energy level at which it was operating, take instructions from you or your utility as to when it should operate and at what level of power, and tell your utility when it wanted to purchase or sell electricity. You and your utility now have two-way communications.”

Thomas Freidman

So the smart fridge is not dead but it just won’t be doing the weekly shop for us, it will be helping save the planet (or at least your energy bill).

Clearly ubiquitous computing is closely tied to the Semantic Web. Until machines can parse the web on our behalf we are stuck with large screens so that we can parse the data for them. The smart fridge will need Semantic Web technologies and so link into a larger body of data about our energy use; where it comes from (clean or dirty), how it is being used in the home and the damage it is doing. Targeted advertising will illustrate how new, more efficient, appliances will impact our energy use and so on into the graph…

Currently we have little context to understand our energy use and context is king when it comes to education and driving real changes in behaviour. Perhaps the Energy Internet and the tackling of one of the big problems will be the making of the Semantic Web project.

Update: The Talis people have written a nice post about semweb and the home: http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/2008/12/smart-stuff.php

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