Hi !
My idea for Phloem is that the data would be owned and controlled by the user ideally. My idea for phloem is partially based on secure scuttle butt, where your various computers could follow your smart meter and store the data long term.
It gets more complicated when you try and figure out how much data to send to the energy companies. In a normal grid tied situation they need pretty accurate data, so they can both bill and predict energy demands.
In a situation where you have your own battery they only need to know your demand for grid energy (and predicted demand), not your entire energy usage. This could hide some demand and preserve privacy a bit more, so they canât necessarily tell when you are home based on your energy usage, etc.
It both situations (and a long time from now, barring government regulation), you could imagine smart meters only sending their daily usage on a per house basis and the energy companies getting combined usage data from substations.
This would still allow power companies to predict demand accurately.
Just to let people know why I am not working on this at the moment, I havenât had much engagement from the protocol design people. So it seems unlikely to help with CO2 emissions in the next 10-20 years, which was my hope. It would need significant investment and interest from lots of different parties and lack of engagement from the people I expected to be most interested was pretty discouraging overall.
So I am currently looking at putting my technical skills behind things that will either definitely help a small amount in a short time frame, or potentially help a lot in the long time frame.