Residential customers embrace the power to choose

摘要

In the late 1970s, Southern Co. speculated that the home of the future would feature a host of electronic devices that would play an important part in household management. Because the idea of real-time pricing of electricity was being examined at the time from both a theoretical and practical perspective, the company combined these two perspectives to develop a concept called residential advanced energy management (RAEM), which relies on a schedule of prices that varies during the day and from season to season. Also necessary to RAEM is a home energy management system that the customer can program to automatically respond to price signals and life-style considerations.