Much has been said about the shift to smart meters and the shift to an smart grid for electricity. This morning I had a piece in the paper explaining how smart meters will crank up the price of electricity.

The scary thing about smart meters is that it delivers more power to electricity companies. They will be able to offer deals, but in exchange for that, people will be giving them more power to switch systems on and off.

At the same time, however, smart meters open the way for new industries and entrepreneurs. With smart meters, for example, consumers can rely on different retailers to handle different parts of their electricity consumption. One retailer would sell them electricity, another might provide them with rebates to reduce their consumption, and help them manage it. But customers would get sick of multiple bill payments so we might see third party coming in to help them manage it.

Under the old system, electricity companies send someone out to read meters a handful of times a year. But smart meters provide a reading every 30 minutes, so the electricity company suddenly has 17,500 readings a year (48 readings a day multiplied by 365) which means the companies will have to bring in new IT systems and hire a whole lot more people. Again, that opens the way for a business to come in and manage that for the electricity company.

Smart meters can also result in smart homes, the kind of stuff that Thomas Friedman talks about in his book Hot, Flat and Crowded where we will see a smart energy grid that would use power more efficiently, turning the home into a Smart Black Box (SBB) that controls and ensures the seamless inter-operability of lighting, home alarm system, telephones, computers, internet connections and all other devices, while telling you how much energy they use and ensuring the heating, air-conditioning units, dishwasher, dryer, refrigerator and car battery can run at lower power. Just press the "sleep" button on the SBB control panel when you walk out the door and all lights and appliances either switch off or go to their lowest necessary power. Alternatively, you can call your SBB from your mobile on your way home to tell the house to "wake up". It is a world where an electric car can charge and store energy at night. Indeed, it's no longer called a car ("The term "car" is now considered to be so, gosh, 20th century"), it's a Rolling Energy Storage Unit (RESU) and is now a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that can be charged at home, or at any ramp.

But managing all this can be time consuming so we will see companies springing up that will go in and help households run Smart Homes. These companies will spring up alongside utilities in the same way that internet service providers worked in with telcos.

Smart grids will create an entirely new IT infrastructure. As this piece points out, grids reaching individual houses and commercial and industrial facilities via smart meters will have millions and millions of nodes, far more than the number of nodes you have in the IT infrastructure of a large corporation. That is plenty of work, either in jobs or in new companies for people skilled in or holding positions in IT, automation, control systems, firmware, back-office systems, graphics for visualization, and security technologies. This has the potential of creating new businesses.

It's a point taken up by economics professor Jeremy Rifikin in this lecture.

Rifkin says: "The great pivotal economic changes in world history have occurred when new energy regimes converge with new communication regimes. When that convergence happens, society is restructured in wholly new ways. In the early modern era, the coming together of coal powered steam technology and the print press gave birth to the first industrial revolution. It would have been impossible to organize the dramatic increase in the pace, speed, flow, density, and connectivity of economic activity made possible by the coal fired steam engine using the older codex and oral forms of communication. In the late nineteenth century and throughout the first two thirds of the twentieth century, first generation electrical forms of communication-the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, electric typewriters, calculators, etc.-converged with the introduction of oil and the internal combustion engine, becoming the communications command and control mechanism for organizing and marketing the second industrial revolution."

Smart meters and smart homes have the capacity to revolutionize society. It will go well beyond electricity.

But it will leave us with a number of uncomfortable questions. Who exactly owns the load? And what are the checks and balances to the power handed over to electricity companies.