This was one of my favorite projects. We were tasked with creating a web based home energy management system to help empower people to manage their energy usage.  Appliances and thermostats could be connected to the system where the user could setup rules to govern their behavior based on the time of day and different pricing tiers.  People would have insights into their monthly power usage and would be notified in advance of a brown out and they could adjust their electrical load remotely thus lessening their pull on the eletrical grid.