Maryland Business

By: Danielle Ulman

File this under visions of the future.

Life as the cartoon family the Jetsons knew it could be coming to a home near you relatively soon.

That doesn’t mean flying cars or robots that do your laundry, more like a computer that is hooked up to all the circuits in your home, that can turn down your heat or cooling system remotely, communicate with your appliances, generate your bills and show you where you use most of your energy each month.

“You’ll have the ability to come in and say ‘Between my gas and electric I normally pay $300, but this month I want it to be $225,’ and the system will automatically adjust for that. You’ll come back and say, ‘Well, that’s a little warm when I come home and I want to have X,Y and Z done,’” said Ray Gogel, the new president of Germantown-based Current Group LLC.

I sat down with Gogel for an interview on the company’s efforts to make the electricity grid more efficient through technology on Tuesday morning. When I told Gogel that the idea seemed a little far fetched, he and colleague Jim Mollenkopf insisted that it shouldn’t.

“It maybe sounds like the Jetsons, but in so many other industries we’re used to that, and in electricity our expectations haven’t caught up with that,” Mollenkopf said.

Both men said they envision a future where there’s a sophisticated computer system that does the dirty work for you once you’ve entered all of your desired specifications. Want your dishwasher to run at 2 a.m. when power is the cheapest? The computer will eventually be able to make that happen.

“That will be when we don’t have to think about it again, which is how we as Americans want to deal with electricity,” Gogel said.  “We don’t want to think about it.”

Sounds good, but I’m still waiting for someone to bring to life the computerized conveyor belt system that got the Jetsons ready for school and work every morning.