Right now your appliances and building equipment cost you money, from the time you buy them to the time they stop working. Repairs and energy expenses mean your refrigerator, microwave, lights - they perform their core jobs then depreciate until you need a replacement. The connected device future is going to revolutionize the use of devices and household equipment, extend product lifespans, reduce resource consumption, and even change how you earn money. Household items are already learning how to save you cash on the fly. GE and Nest provide household equipment that down-cycles energy use when you do not need it, effectively creating micro demand response for your property. Appliances will also become assets with a few forms of revenue.
Companies will start to lease appliances to you at a discount so they can access your behavioral data and energy use patterns. In fact, they may even share the wealth, giving you the appliance for free and splitting their profits with you. In some cases, your data will be more valuable to marketers and product developers than the revenue from energy itself. All of this data will be managed through an Internet of things and smart home backbone, which will sync up to the cloud. Your intelligent devices, all equipped with micro-processors and machine learning capabilities, will know when to conserve energy and go into full utilization mode when energy is at its cheapest.
New appliance functionality connects you to cloud and will eventually make you some money for hosting data. In a device connected world, data could theoretically be housed and processed on any server connecting to the web. As you might imagine, processing your annual accounting info in a micro server in your neighbor's Nest thermostat might present security risks. Much of these threats will be eliminated by something called "blockchains." In other words, the data origin will be distributed and protected so no human or machine will be able to put it back together again until it reaches it's final, secure destination. This could revolutionize how we pay for data hosting, and who we pay, as even our most basic appliances become secure data warehousing and processing hubs. This means you could be compensated to host someone's web data, just like you'd be paid to host an AirBNB guest.
With new technology comes new revenue potential. In a not-too-distant future, you will choose your refrigerator and washing machine based on return on investment (ROI) rather than projected appliance life. Your behavioral info, your capacity to host data, and your energy responsiveness will continue to gain value with the rise of device connectivity. Be educated, be prepared.
Nicholas Davis is a managing director at
AGRION Americas, New York, N.Y. Tags: