visibility and power management

Hot on the heels of my last post where I ranted about better use of existing power I noticed this article in the IHT regarding Google's tool "PowerMeter". From the article:

Google is one of a number of companies devising ways to control the demand for electric power as an alternative to building more power plants. The company has developed a free Web service called PowerMeter that consumers can use to track energy use in their house or business as it is consumed.

Google says: "Studies show that access to your household's personal energy information is likely to save you between 5–15% on your monthly bill" (and provides sources and calculations). 

Compare this with this statement from the US Energy Information Administration regarding projected global energy consumption (this is a great read, btw):

World marketed energy consumption is projected to increase by 50 percent from 2005 to 2030.Total energy demand in the non-OECD countries increases by 85 percent, compared with an increase of 19 percent in the OECD countries. 

This suggests that in North America, with increased visibility of consumption patterns alone, we can absorb the next 20 years of economic growth on our existing power infrastructure. If we grow our energy consumption on off-peak hours, we don't need to build new plants; we can focus exclusively on shifting to renewable resources.  

What this says to me is that we're not desperate for new capacity. We need clean, reliable, efficient sources. We need to drop our carbon footprint, but we also need to build a more robust and self-healing system. If we're going to sink $60B into infrastructure, let's build a system that can't be knocked out with a single point of failure. That means we need to invest heavily in innovative research and planning now. We need legislation and taxes that reduce power consumption in all devices and their lifecycles. This is an opportunity to look not just at energy consumption but at design methodology and gear our economy to reward the creation of more desirable technologies. We need to consider power, resource, social and human use of the technologies. Just swapping the battery without looking at the machine is missing the point.