Could You Soon be Charged to Plug Into Public Outlets?

Community power-up stations have been cropping up in public places like airports for years now. Conversations about public charging stations for electric vehicles is growing as well. But who is, or will, pay for this electricity? And what of "electrical theft?"

With these questions and energy conservation in mind, Sony has recently released prototype technology for an outlet that would recognize a user and charge them accordingly.

Sony developed two types of "authentification outlets," which were announced last month, one that uses contactless IC card technology and one that authenticates via a cable power supply. With such an outlet, power would only be supplied to authenticated equipment.

Here's what Sony said about the outlet:

 Once these “Authentication Outlets” are widely implemented, users will be able to authenticate the owners of electrical devices (e.g. home electric appliances, electrical vehicles), manage and consume electricity on a per-device basis in addition to authorizing their use, keep records of past electricity usage, and finally have the ability to be charged and then process payments for their electricity consumption by combining the aforementioned features with electronic money payments.

Watch this demonstration of the outlet from DigInfo TV:

On a larger scale, it is described in the demonstration that the technology can also help avoid blackouts by switching off non-vital equipment when demand is about to exceed supply.

Ars Technica explains that Sony sees a future for this in preventing "electricity theft" in, for example, the common area of an apartment building. Ars Technica reports that there is no commercial release planned for this technology yet. An official states that the company will be in conversations with the power supply industry and other manufacturers to eventually bring this prototype to fruition.