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Saving energy Italian style

January 6th, 2010 by Gene

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Say Italy, and most people think of fashion, fast cars and spaghetti. Maybe we should be thinking of something else. Saving energy. Today, on Engineering Works! Just about everywhere in the industrialized world, people are looking for ways to save energy. Especially electricity. So far, Italy seems to be ahead in developing an electrical grid that manages electricity efficiently. A smart grid. The key to the Italian smart grid is a new kind of electric meter. A smart meter. The smart meter tells the electric company how much electricity you’re using, right now, and tells you how much the electricity you’re using, right now, costs. This helps the company run its generators efficiently and lets you decide when to do activities that use a lot of electricity, maybe at times when rates are cheaper. More than eight in 10 Italian homes have smart meters, and they work. Power engineers estimate that using the new meters saves Italy’s largest electric company seven-hundred-50-million-dollars a year and cuts customers’ energy bills by as much as half. One of the little but important things about the new meters is that they’re installed inside the house, where you can see them easily, instead of outside, where you can’t. Might there be a smart meter in your future? We can’t say, but electric companies in Florida and California have visited to take a look. Our smart meter says it’s time to hit the switch. See you next time. Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu.