In keeping in the same green vein, smart meters will soon be able to tell us just how doing a full load in the washing machine costs in energy and pounds – and change the way we view our energy consumption.

One of the firms behind these great little devices is Lumison customer, Abelon Systems. Trials of innovative new smart meters which the embedded systems design company helped design and build will now be trialled in 2,000 homes across the UK this summer.

The meters will be rolled out by OnStream, one of Britain’s leading installation and metering service companies and part of the National Grid group, who chose Abelon Systems ahead of larger more established firms to assist in the development of this new type of smart meter.

Once measured by the smart meter, data is sent wirelessly to the Lumison datacentre in Newbridge, to store, process and make sense of the huge amount of data from potentially hundred of thousands of meters for the energy companies.

And why did they choose Lumison? Business Director Adrian McKie did point to the datacentre location in Scotland but ultimately what swung the decision was something quite human: "When we visited the Newbridge datacentre we realised they had the same books on their shelves as our engineers!" It just goes to show how talking the same language can always makes a difference.

Ultimately, Abelon's success is just another example of a large enterprise turning to the ingenuity of small to medium sized company to help deliver next generation technology – and it's great to see yet another Scottish firm punch above its weight in this way!