Steve Kropper has some ideas:

I want to cover my home’s roof with solar cells that generate electricity. I want a co-generation unit (heat and power) in my basement. That sounds like the internet: freedom to plug in your own personal devices.

Today, we blog, upload videos to YouTube, FTP files to our websites and download music (legally, of course). We can buy a dot-com address and launch a website in an hour. Bits of information flow in and out of our house driven by our media hunger or creativity.

If the electric grid was open and smart (it is neither), we might all be creating a bit of power from our rooftops or our basements or we’d sell a promise NOT to use power for an hour on a hot day. But the grid is not designed to track and control thousands of small devices. It only thinks big, ordering power plants to turn on and asking factories to turn off to avoid brownouts. Like the phone network in 1983, today’s grid is closed, dumb and hostile to interconnection.