Recovery Act - Smart Low-Cost Controller Chip for Grid-Friendly Household Appliances

Electrical grids are overloaded on a daily basis due to peaking electrical demand. In order to satisfy this peak demand utilities fire-up expensive and polluting gas and oil stand-by generators. Billions of dollars are spent and wasted each year on this problem due to miss-matched electrical average supply and peak demand during the day. Our semiconductor chip developed during Phases I and II will be incorporated into consumer electrical appliances (washing machines, dryers, pool equipment, etc.) This chip automatically signals the appliance to shut down or to reduce its electrical usage temporarily while the local grid is overloaded in order to help balance electrical supply and demand. The potential market size for this less-than-$1.00 chip, once completed and commercialized through the SBIR program, is in the high multi-hundred million units per year. Such a wide deployment over the next decade will result in significantly reduced investment in inefficient peak-demand stand-by electrical generation infrastructure, with the attendant reduction in pollution.