Attached to almost every house, apartment building, and office complex in the United States is a familiar and rather homely device. Inside its glass cover, a counter ticks off the kilowatts as the meter measures and records the amount of energy consumed by kitchen appliances, air conditioners, computers, light bulbs, and other electrically-powered devices inside the premises. For more than a hundred years the basic electric meter design focused on this mission of accurate measurement, providing utility companies with a reliable record of electricity usage that could be turned into a monthly bill for each customer.

When meters finally entered the digital age during the 1990s, the priority for utilities was automating the time-consuming and costly process of meter reading rather than giving their customers more information about their power usage. The possibility that the humble electric meter could cooperate with the average residential consumer in managing peak energy demand cycles and avoiding brown-outs was, at best, a far-fetched vision for the distant future. To the extent that records of monthly electric power consumption at the residential level were used to forecast future demand and power-generation needs, the utility's strategy was straightforward. The electric utilities simply planned for continued year-over-year increases in energy consumption. The historical data for electric power demand in the United States certainly supported the assumption that consumption and demand would continue to increase; according to the Department of Energy (DoE), the demand for power rose almost 30 percent between 1988 and 1998 (US Department of Energy, 2008a).