Smart appliances have the ability to communicate with smart meters and in-home energy management devices. They are programmed to adjust their behaviour to conserve electricity and to save you money without sacrificing convenience, control or comfort. For example, today’s refrigerator defrosts based on how often its door opens and closes. The smart refrigerator can delay the defrost cycle or make ice at times when energy demand is lower and potentially less expensive.

Today, you may glance at your electricity bill without considering how much you've consumed or when. But that's about to change with the real-time feedback delivered by digital smart meters.

Smart meters will give you greater control of your home energy consumption through in-home feedback devices, helping you save energy and money. Along with the supporting infrastructure, they’ll also improve outage detection and provide faster power restoration.

From February 10-19, Our Home of the Future will feature a Chevy Volt, a present-day example of a plug-in vehicle that can not only lower our dependence on fossil fuels and cut our emissions, but save us money as well.

How? As smart grids and peak-time pricing schemes emerge, you'll be able to plug in your vehicle overnight when electricity is cheaper. And you'll have the option to sell electricity stored in the car's battery back to the grid during the day when rates are higher.

Solar panels collect sunlight and convert it to energy that can be used as electricity.

Our home of the future features a roof equipped with solar panels, a clean, environmentally-friendly means of collecting renewable energy from the sun.

Using half the energy of today’s water heaters, the hybrid version absorbs heat from the surrounding air and transfers it to the water in the tank.

Since it takes less energy to absorb and transfer heat than it does to generate it, the hybrid hot water heater will save money and cut energy use.

Each year, more than a million shipping containers around the world become surplus. Although steel is not a renewable resource, we can put these excess containers to good use by converting them to sturdy, lower-cost homes, including our Home of the Future at Power Smart Village.

The containers act as building blocks that can be stacked and connected to provide efficient living spaces.