Why don’t power companies provide their customers better ways to track their electricity usage? Don’t get me wrong – I love the little bar graphs that Progress Energy puts on their monthly bills, but the problem is they’re monthly. I want data that’s more real-time. Wouldn’t it be great if you could query your electric meter to get the current (ha!) usage, anytime you wanted? I’d love to graph this data and use it to really analyze how we use electricity in our home: things like how much power a particular appliance draws when running and so forth. I know that some power companies use electronic meters that can be read remotely by meter readers – why not let the customer do that, too?
Progress is switching to digital home meters sometime in the next two years.