This is the second article in a three-part series titled Your Brain on Energy for ournew Energy and Environment coverage. The first article, titled The next energy revolution wont be in wind or solar. It will be in our brains, appeared last week.

Five years ago came the promise: A great new way of saving money on yourenergy billswas on its way. An impressivenew devicecalled a smart meter a key component of the much touted smart grid would let consumers actuallyseehow much power theyre using in their homes, thus empowering them to change their habitsand slash their bills.

President Obama heralded the innovation: Smart meters will allow you to actually monitor how much energy your family is using by the month, by the week, by the day, or even by the hour, hesaidin 2009, as the federal government unleashed a $3.4 billion Smart Grid investment. So coupled with other technologies,this is going to help you manage your electricity use and your budget at the same time.

Lofty words butwhen it comes to changing peoples energy behavior, the smart meter revolution so far hasnt been very revolutionary.

True, the meters are everywhere utilities have installed 50 millionat homes across the U.S., reaching 43 percent of homes overall, according to the Edison Foundations Institute for Electric Innovation. Butthat doesnt mean consumers are easily accessing the available data or using it to change their energy use.

Initially I had pretty high hopes, says Carrie Armel, a research associate at the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University and a leader of anew wave of behavioral research on energy use. I think the technology has a lot of potential. In retrospect, in that nobody has really leveraged the technology along with efficient behavioral techniques, I find its not surprising that we didnt find rate savings.

Smart meters are a nifty new technology that can record yourelectricity usage on at least an hourly basis (and sometimes much more frequently). But behavioral research suggests thattechnologies alone dont necessarily change what we do, how we act, the habits we form. In the case of smart meters, what still seems missing in most cases are user interfaces that relay information from the meter in real time, and translate it into dollars and cents. Consumers also need much more access to an innovation called smart pricing in other words, electricity prices that vary based on supply and demand a key change the Smart Grid was designed to enable, and one that might make it a lot more worthwhile to pay attention to your energy behavior.

The upshot: Right now, smart meters arent waking Americans up and making them conscious of their energy use because they arent being paired with what behavioral research shows us is needed for that to happen.

This is the story of why the smart meter revolution has, thus far,fallen short and howwe can better use one of the most pivotal innovations in the electricity sphere to save energy, cut greenhouse gas emissions and save a lot of money.

The problem of rational inattentiveness

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Americans are this close to finally understanding their energy bills and saving a lot of money