The Consumer Electronics Show has started, and we device and gadget geeks are having fun! One thing I noticed quickly is in this Engadget post about Oregon Scientific’s new device offerings:

Look at the device on the far right — it’s a wireless appliance manager “to help users keep an eye on how much energy up to eight appliances are using”. Look at how elegant it is! Clean, simple interface, shows the energy costs by appliance and a total energy cost for all of them, boom, done. It would probably not require much programming to make it transactive, so that the homeowner could choose trigger prices by appliance to make the appliances themselves price responsive.

That’s what I’m talking about when I effuse about the potential for in-home energy management technology. Clean, elegant design, transactive (or, in this case, potentially transactive) functionality.

It’s early in the CES; there’s more of this to come.