Decking out homes with smartphone-controlled appliances and using gadgets to keep tabs on electricity usage isn't exactly new, but the MeterPlug thinks it can do a better job of tracking exactly how much dough your devices are burning in electricity.
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It wants to know how much you make in salary and dividends, the time you leave for work, the number of bedrooms in your house and whether there is a toilet, how much you pay in electricity bills and for water and sewer services, whom you work for, whether you have trouble walking or lifting things and on and on.
We can imagine the day when you'll be able to charge the battery on your plug-in hybrid car at night, because your smart meter reminded you that nighttime electricity is cheapest.
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If we get plug-in hybrid cars, you can plug it in at night and sell back electricity to the utility, and then charge up your car again in the morning before you leave.
You cut your utility budgets to the bone in order to keep electricity bills at a minimum.
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Second, through sources like wind energy, produced in part by your turbines, I want us to double the amount of electricity that we draw from clean sources.
It is needed to make plastics, to fly planes, to propel construction equipment and to turn generators to make electricity that keeps the lights on and your computer humming in your home or office.
This was just the first in a near-comical procession of lurking horrors from anaconda that can digest an entire deer to the slivery candiru (parasitic toothpick fish) that can lodge, die and rot in your urethra, from puraques (eels) that can send 650 volts of electricity into their prey to bullet ants whose stings feel like being shot (all dangers we thankfully avoided).
Your annual consumption of electricity will increase by about 2, 000 kilowatt hours in the course of the 1990s -- a bit more than it increased in the 1980s.
"Prior to the electricity, we came in and had to come with a torch or a candle and light your gas, if you had gas, light your candles, " he said.
The CFO badgered you every month about your endless demands for more real estate in which to put endlessly growing racks of servers requiring endlessly growing volumes of electricity and air conditioning, but what else could you do?
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