One smart community
Alexa, what will it be like to wake up in the future?
Residents in the Reynolds Landing neighbourhood of Birmingham, Ala., don’t have to wonder. They’re living in what Todd Rath, a spokesman for utility Alabama Power, is saying homes will look like in 2040.
The 62 houses are finished with smart appliances such as locks, thermostat, and even a refrigerator with a built-in camera to check how much milk is left when you’re at the store.
“What we’ve done here is create some very efficient homes, connect them up, and we’re trying to understand how we’re serving those customers,” Rath told CNN.
The homes are designed to not only be smart, but efficient. Alabama Power designed and built the neighbourhood to monitor energy consumption, and to see if smart appliances have any impact on the amount of electricity used.
The entire neighbourhood is run off a nearby grid of solar panels, but has a natural gas generator as a backup.
Since heating and cooling uses the most electricity of anything in a typical home, the smart homes are outfitted with thermostats that can control the temperatures in individual rooms and be changed from a smartphone.
Smart devices use less energy overall to heat and cool a house than regular units, and the homeowners get the benefit of controlling it from anywhere, Nick Lange, a consultant at sustainable power company Vermont Energy Investment Corp., told CNN.
“Smart thermostats are a good example of a relatively pain-free way to have a big impact,” Lange said.
The smart homes cost about US$400,000, right around the average house price in the area, according to Rath.
The benefits of smart homes such as convenience and being able to check on the house outweigh risks, such as hacking, he said.
Cybersecurity company Avast released a report earlier this year saying 40 per cent of devices in smart homes are vulnerable to attacks, with printers being the easiest target.
“What (Alabama Power) put together is a realistic example of what future homes communities are likely to have,” Lange said. “But I can say almost certainly that those future homes will be better versions of them.”