Michael Kanellos
Pre-Paid Power Bills Coming to U.S. July 17, 2008 at 4:42 PM
You’ve seen pre-paid cell phones. Now get ready for pre-paid power bills.
A few utilities in the U.S. are looking at implementing pre-paid, or pay-as-you-go, power bills, according to Adrian Tuck, CEO of Tendril, a start-up specializing in household energy management. The concept is simple. You pay money to the utility at the beginning of the month, and they keep the lights on as long as your cash holds out.
The concept was started in Europe, he noted. Utilities in England, in fact, used to put coin slots in buildings so residents could chalk up another 50p of power when they needed it. Now, people mostly pay through their cell phones. It’s mostly for people with bad credit (i.e. temp workers, band members and former Bear Stearns partners.) Nonetheless, it’s now a huge part of the market now.
The system is also popular with owners of apartment buildings who don’t want to get stuck with the power bills of departing tenants.
Tendril, by the way, makes Zigbee-enabled devices such as thermostats that allow the resident or the utility to control heating, lighting and other energy hogs from a distance. The company designs and sells hardware as well as management services. While there are a bunch of companies in this market, they seem to be emerging pretty well from the pack.
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[...] a notable achievement and, in the increasingly crowded field of smart metering and automated energy management, it is the sort of metric that will underscore who is winning and who is falling [...]