BERKELEY -- Here in California, things are bad, energy-wise. You know this, of course -- even if you've never set foot in the Golden State, you've likely heard about how California could suffer a month of rolling blackouts this summer.
But don't count out Cally. On Friday, scientists at the University of California at Berkeley showed off a new technology they're calling "smart dust," which -- if it works -- might be the silver lining of California's electricity cloud.
"Smart dust" is a cute name for a technology that, if it pans out commercially, could improve the whole damn world. That was the bold message at the Berkeley's press demo on Friday -- and if you went in thinking that it was all a bit of bluster, you left wondering why all the dust in this world isn't smart.
Essentially, smart dust is made up of thousands of sand-grain-sized sensors that can measure ambient light and temperature. The sensors -- each one is called a "mote" -- have wireless communications devices attached to them, and if you put a bunch of them near each other, they'll network themselves automatically.
These sensors, which would cost pennies each if mass-produced, could be plastered all over office buildings and homes. Each room in an office building might have a hundred or even a thousand light- and temperature-sensing motes, all of which would tie into a central computer that regulates energy usage in the building.
Taken together, the motes would constitute a huge sensor network of smart dust, a network that would give engineers insight into how energy is used and how it can be conserved. In a dust-enabled building, computers would turn off lights and climate control in empty rooms. During peak energy usage times, air conditioners that cool servers -- which drain a lot of the tech world's power -- would be automatically shut off, and then turned on again if the servers get too hot.
Making buildings smart is important because climate control, lighting and equipment costs of American buildings consume more than a third of the country's energy. Reducing their consumption -- especially at times of low energy supplies -- should be a part, the folks at Berkeley say, of a sensible energy plan.
Kris Pister, a Berkeley electrical engineering professor and the inventor of smart dust, has huge plans for the technology.
The motes can be powered by vibrations in the wall -- a bit like a self-winding wristwatch -- or by solar light or even changes in barometric pressure. This makes smart dust very flexible, which is why Pister envisions it everywhere, doing practically anything -- monitoring how traffic is flowing, say, to determine how to time traffic-lights, or monitoring the vital signs of elderly or sick people.
"It's not just academic research," Pister said, explaining that people don't have any idea where most of the energy is being used in a building or a house. "It will provide real data about what's happening at any moment."
The knowledge that comes with dust will promote conservation, as well, the scientists said. People will see, in real-time, how much energy they're using and how much it's costing them.
"Right now," said Pister, "we are only saving for altruistic reasons. This will add economic incentives."
But there's a catch to the dizzy over dust: the stuff hasn't quite been invented yet. So far, the smallest dust mote that Pister and his team have made is about a hundred cubic millimeters in volume, about the size of an M&M. It's small, but it's not tiny.
But Pister says that they're not far from much much smaller devices.
"Where we're headed is to demonstrate this in a volume of one cubic millimeter, which is about one hundred times smaller than this," he said, referring to the M&M-sized mote. Pister said that the dust-sized motes might be ready in about six months or so.
And according to Richard Newton, the dean of Berkeley's College of Engineering, when you get sensors that small, all kinds of interesting things happen.
"We could basically dump these things in a can of paint, paint them on the walls," he said. "We estimate that smart technology like this could save between $5 and $7 billion if we can deploy it, and reduce about 30,000 tons per year of carbon emissions around the country."
But Newton did add that "some people worry when you have these sensors (if they) can tell whether someone was in a room or not, and that's something we're working on too."
He said that the smart dust research team included attorneys from Berkeley's law school as well as sociologists who are examining the thorny societal concerns the technology raises.
"It's good that people worry about the social aspects of these technologies," he said.
