You know, the future used to be so much cooler before we gave up on our dreams of flying cars. Now instead of powering jet engines, it looks like our automobiles will power household appliances, and household appliances will use technologies like GE’s SmartMeter to communicate with the local capability grid. that could lead to such sexy contrivances as refrigerators that wait until off-peak hours to run the motorized defrost cycle, and (in coordination with tiered pricing for electricity and some new energy storage options) a bit of relief from the old fossil fuels. possibly that is not precisely the stuff of William Gibson novels, but to build out more about “Energy Management Enabled Appliances” go ahead and hit that read link.