The other day I opened my utility bill and just about hit the floor because my electric bill was so huge.  I have to get a handle on how much power I am using, I thought, as I wrote way to large of a check to our local utility.  Fast forward a month and I found myself having lunch with a good friend of mine, Dennis Kyle, a consumer marketing uberstar who is now working at Tendril Networks.  Tendril is a “smart energy” start-up that is working in the energy management industry.  For a consumer, Tendril will provide a small display device called an Insight.  The Insight will track kilowatts used and cost per hour of energy as it is used.  It can also communicate wirelessly with other energy management devices in your home.

For those of you with children that leave lights on all over the house, or who turn on two electric ovens to 450 degrees to cook two pizzas, the Insight will alert you when your power usage exceeds a pre-configured threshold, signaling an alarm that clues everyone into the situation immediately.

After lunch, my mind started spinning with how this service could be optimized for restaurants.  The key to Tendril is that it can use information from multiple devices to make smart energy decisions.  For me, the obvious information tie into restaurants was point of sale data.  What if you could interconnect POS trending data with energy management?  How about turning on/off ovens or other cooking devices based on historical trending of the average/peak number of guests for that day?

While it’s early, smart energy is the way of the future and I suspect the return on investment for retail is just around the corner.