I was intrigued a couple months ago when Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE, stood before an audience and used the term “digital energy” as he threw down $200 million looking for great ideas in the smart grid, smart energy, electric vehicles, and more ways to use electricity better. (I gave GE’s Nucleus home energy gateway an Editor’s Choice selection last month; it’s a great example of GE’s commitment.)

Digital energy is a perfect term in quite a few ways for us here at Embedded Computing Design. It accurately conveys what’s going on, applying digital electronics to the electrical grid. It also speaks to one of the great strategies of our time, combining unique technology with the ideas of empowering consumers and helping save the planet, all brought to you by silicon and software.

Digital energy isn’t hype. It’s not Al Gore marketing and all the counterbalance blather over the rate of global warming. It’s not Marie Hattar of Cisco proclaiming last year that the smart grid network is “100 or 1,000 times larger than the Internet.” Unless you live in a remote part of Afghanistan (in which case you wouldn’t be reading this), digital energy is a real transformation that is coming to your house and will affect the way you live. That effect will eventually be just as important as the first arrival of electricity at your ancestors’ houses generations ago. It is one of the two megatrends – the other being medical, eHealth, or telehealth depending on who’s describing it – that I hear over and over again in my conversations with people about where our embedded industry is heading next.

We got kind of bogged down in the term “smart meter,” and the hype there actually turned people off for a while. Although smart meters are one important piece in digital energy, they are far from the only one. The discussion in our recent panel on “Smart grid: What’s here, what’s needed, and what you should know now” showed this clearly and really seems to have struck a nerve. It’s become the second most viewed piece of content we’ve published in Embedded Computing Design this year, and if you haven’t seen it, it’s worth studying.

Like any good embedded market, this is going to take years to happen even if everything goes perfectly well. It’s not like a smartphone market with a 12-month lifespan. We’re talking about lots of equipment, major expenditures, large geographies, and perhaps the hardest part: changing consumer behavior. Our APS panelist commented that the utility is studying consumer behavior for two years in a pilot program just to learn more about what to do.

But it is happening. Estimates from Lux Research put digital energy at something around a $4.5 billion market today, led by smart meters, growing to a $15 billion market by 2015 (and that doesn’t include things like smart appliances, which have some embedded silicon and software content). The field is open for imagination on how to use microcontrollers, sensors, power line and wireless networking, and software to build devices that connect everything using electricity to a managed system, helping both consumers and utilities be smarter.

This is just food for thought right now. We’ve been bringing ideas to embedded designers in Deep Green for the past few years and will do more with digital energy in the coming months. E-mail me at ddingee@opensystemsmedia.com or tweet me at @dondingee, and share your thoughts about what information you’d like to see on the smart grid, smart home, smart building, electric vehicles, and other innovations in digital energy.