With my permission. They picked me to be a guinea pig in a trial program of programmable, Internet-accessible thermostats. I assume I was picked at random but maybe not. The cool thing for the consumer is that you can set the new thermostat from the Internet. The key from BGE's point of view was a feature allowing the company to shut off my air conditioner for a few minutes at a time on very hot days requiring high kilowatt demand. I think they picked like 1,000 households for the pilot program. BGE guys came to the house, removed the old thermostat and installed this one, which I believe is made by Comverge. The setup is similar to a shutoff box that BGE has placed on people's air conditioner compressors for years. But in this case it's Internet based, and the company was shutting the AC on and off pretty frequently.

Not that I noticed. Yesterday I got the results for the summer. They shut the AC off eight times -- four times in June, once in July and three times in August. They didn't say how many minutes my unit was off each time, but nobody in my family could tell the difference. This is a taste of what the future of home electricity will look like. Eventually our meters themselves will be Internet-based and will be tied into all sorts of cool information from the grid involving how much kilowatts are costing at any given minute. You'll be able to program your AC yourself to shut down if kilowatts get too expensive on high-use days, which will save you money and reduce the need to build new, ugly, expensive, polluting generators.