But a nationwide project underway to lift the IQ of our dumb power grid will make our homes and workplaces better able to manage the power they consume.
And it offers a broad swathe of opportunities for IT resellers to find new markets, energy insiders say.
In the biggest change to power distribution since Nikola Tesla was a boy gazing up at lightning storms in the night sky, Australia's electricity companies and governments are rolling out smart networks to replace those powering the nation for the past century.
The most obvious change most will see is attached to the wall of their premises. At a cost of $2.8 billion to $4.6 billion, about 10 million electromechanical power meters will be replaced by smart meters loaded with the potential to reduce usage. The new meters are $150-$250 each.
The meters report to energy companies on how power is consumed, are disconnected and reconnected remotely and promise to connect wirelessly to devices inside the house to manage loads.
And they may be controlled remotely, for instance, to lower the air-conditioning on a hot day or schedule energy-guzzling white goods such as fridges to defrost or clothes dryers to operate at night when the load on the network is light and the cost lower.
But this advanced meter infrastructure, which will save $4.8 billion to $7.5 billion, is only the visible component.
Distributors are installing thousands of sensors at substations and on Australia's streets to alert them to events that could harm the grid. The pay day for resellers, power industry insiders say, is to bring IT smarts to the back offices of energy companies so they can secure and make sense of the welter of data about to come their way.
When all the pieces are in place around the end of next decade, Australia will have a smart grid that intelligently routes electricity in the most efficient way and heals itself when disaster strikes.
Water suppliers are keen observers, so impressed are they by promises of reduced emissions and operating costs. Waiting for a blackout or a burst water main to identify flaws in our ageing utilities networks may one day be a dim memory.
Energy Australia is a pioneering electricity distributor building out a smart grid. It put 12,000 sensors on its network to judge, for instance, the loads applied to sub-stations and at street level.
The century-old power distributor supplies 1.6 million houses over 22,275 square kilometres in four states. It started the smart-metering project with the understanding that telecommunications was the "glue" to bond its $170 million smart grid, says its intelligent networks manager Adrian Clark.
"You need good, two-way telecommunications to collect that data and bring that back into the organisation to get good knowledge," Clark says.
The 800-kilometre optical fibre network that it started deploying three years ago to its 200 major sub-stations was completed earlier this year, creating robust links, Clark says. The utility progressed from enterprise to carrier-class networking gear.
"Another key thing we kicked off was a whole bunch of first-generation smart meters [with] time-of-use tariffs," he says. "We did a lot of strategic work around how customers would benefit." It has installed 400,000 of these somewhat-smart devices that don't talk to base but respond to price pressures during the day.
"We've trialled just over 7000 two-way communication smart meters since 2006 and tried a number of different telecommunications technologies to communicate."
Although there is discussion about using the $43 billion national broadband network to carry data back to base, many in the industry advocate a mesh of technologies including flavours of wireless.
Clark says an innovation of which the utility is proud and that generates much interest with other distributors is its monitoring project.
"It's, I think, a world first in smart grids - we've begun the rollout of smart sensors at street level to enable us to improve the reliability and efficiency of the low-voltage grid." Vendor partner IBM is in the process of mining the data collected to assist in planning the network.
And that's where the early gains will be for energy markets - helping distributors better run their networks. Today it takes calls from angry customers to alert an energy company to a problem but soon the energy company will be the first to know.
"We have real-time sensing on every street," Clark says. "It provides us with a whole lot more data about what's going on so we can start to have engineering analytics and diagnostics sitting on network so the types of issues (such as transformers blowing out) can be avoided.
"It allows us to plan the network, respond to outages and maximise assets ... for as long as possible."
Electricity companies admit to a lack of IT and telecommunications smarts when it comes to smart grids. IBM provided $3.2 million of services to Energy Australia to build the IT architecture that conveys the sensor readings.
It's a compelling rib of Big Blue's "Smarter Planet" umbrella that pushes its skills in bringing together complex pieces of the IT puzzle to build more efficient and responsive systems for global commerce.
IBM's communications sector general manager David Murray says the channel should get involved in areas such as business analytics and workflows.
"They're traditional IT services that only recently in the energy utilities industry was the domain of network guys" such as Siemens and GE, Murray says. "The opportunity is now. There's a tipping point any day now.
"Companies like Energy Australia, SP AusNet, Integral, Powercor [are] starting to align to this transformation. If you're not talking to these companies now then your competition is."
Murray says providers of database and customer relationships systems are in particularly powerful positions to help utilities make sense of smart grid data.
"I don't think it's the domain for the IBMs [big IT integrators] solely - those who can get into the industry and show some insight in other industries [such as retail] will be successful." And he picks data storage resellers as likely winners.
With all that information being collected and flowing around the networks, security and privacy will take on new meaning. The potential for abuse worries CSC senior security consultant Gabriel d'Eustachio - but not so much that he would call a halt to the rollouts.
"The amount of data you can deduce from someone's use patterns (from a meter) is really quite frightening," d'Eustachio says. "All of a sudden I know a lot about what you're doing during the day and when you're out of the house.
"I wonder if I could look at your power and your use pattern and deduce if there's an appliance that isn't working as well as it could so I'll market aggressively to you. As a private matter it's no one else's business.
"We have to make sure we have regulatory bodies surrounding it so that people's privacy is respected."
He says the "public should weigh in on" laws and controls so that data on energy and water use isn't used against individuals.
D'Eustachio sees opportunities for providers of security and privacy technologies and services to provide the ethical and legal foundations on which those with networking and marketing smarts, respectively, would collaborate.
CSC is working with technology companies as an honest broker to test the security claims of their products, he says.
Although much of the early work is aimed at managing distributors' grids, the inclusion of a low-bandwidth, wireless networking technology for the home called Zigbee should see smart appliances appear in homes and offices in a few years.
At present, data is collected from dumb meters only once every few months when a reader visits the house. Second-generation smart meters report back every half hour, but the data may only be delivered daily and then only to the power companies.
The promise held out by smart meters is real-time delivery of data to consumers to help them modify their energy use behaviours, although energy insiders say this is a pipe dream in the next five to 10 years. If this day comes, Zigbee will be a key technology.
A house with a Zigbee wireless hub could be programmed to turn on the clothes dryer or dishwasher or defrost the fridge only at night when energy was cheap.
And when electric cars such as the descendents of the Prius become as common as Commodores on our streets, stored power trickled into their batteries at night could be fed back into the grid to power the home or sold back to the power companies.
Imagine a dashboard on your wall or mobile phone telling you your energy use in real-time, along with tips to save money.
Such possibilities excite industry mavens who see an explosion of consumers becoming producers of energy through the installation of solar cells on their roofs, for instance, selling power into the grid to delay infrastructure spending.
Networking makers are looking to build such smarts into consumer routers and switches. And such ideas are trickling from US development labs at Google and Microsoft but the Australian infrastructure is yet to be primed to talk to such devices.
Such "critical" technology is being "actively debated" in national forums, says Perry.
"Government doesn't like prescribing technologies but, in this case, because we wanted to have the same consumer experience across all of Victoria, Government was driven to a point where we needed one standard, open interface," Perry says.
"This whole area of the 'HAN' (home-area network) is huge and its benefits to society will be enormous - it will enable people to [easily] reduce peak demand on hot days. GE and Whirlpool in the US are working on fridges with Zigbee interfaces to defer the defrost cycle.
"The appliance makers will build in [intelligence] that says: 'You want to run the dishwasher, OK, but it's peak time so it will cost you'. The same thing applies to air-conditioning: on peak periods it would by cycled - 15 minutes on, 15 minutes off. You wouldn't notice any appreciable change in comfort levels ... [or] you can say I want to override that [and pay the premium]."
Perry says the intent isn't for the power company to be a "Big Brother" but to give consumers control over their power use and spending and to reflect the real cost of generation while reducing carbon emissions.
And it's a "huge opportunity" for resellers, he says. "Electronics vendors ought to be getting busy, their products ready and their overall market positioning because HANs enable all range of stuff. There's so much that can be done in this space ... to optimise cost and comfort levels."
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