In a recent FT article on the demand for gold, Gillian Tett noted how "ordinary people are unnerved about how money works. Gold is tangible."

Intangibility is not just a problem for money. It is a perennial issue with utilities. Energy management is continually hindered by its invisible, hidden, nature. Even water is transient; gone in a blink down the sink of forgetfulness; elusively present for the brief twist of the tap and memory's faint echo of a flush.

Making utilities tangible has traditionally extended no further than splashing a few colours on a usage graph. Like an x-ray, interpreting the bars and pigments was the domain of specialists; specialists who could diagnose worrying shadows and anomalous peaks. These specialists aren't life savers, just energy savers, but they have a role to play.

Technology, as this generation's great enabler, has brought us many wonders. One of the most exciting is the manipulation and presentation of data. In some respects, data visualisation has even managed to transcend technology to become art. 

This ability to turn numbers into messages is at the heart of what we may look back on as a defining moment in the tangiblisation of utilities. This is more than Big Data. It's more than suppliers spotting trends across a million meters. It's about making data personal.

Perhaps the popularity of smart thermostats are the clearest example of utility tangiblisation. The Nest, a product of an ex-Apple designer and now owned by Google, can be viewed as just a clever way of controlling heating. But what it does, in a way that home energy monitoring devices up to this point have failed to do, is engage the user in an otherwise invisible process: reducing energy use.

It's no surprise that this approach heralds from Silicon Valley technologists and not the utility industry. It takes a different perspective to turn data into a product but it just happens to be the perspective that software and technology companies need to compete.

Whilst the Nest may seem to be just a fancy way of controlling your heating what it has done is demonstrate that there are solutions to the problem of making utilities tangible. More solutions are needed if we are to engage users, perhaps without them actively knowing, in the role of managing their own utilities.

If the problem of utility tangiblisation continues to be solved it may end up being the foundation for building a society actively engaged in energy efficiency (whether we, as consumers, realise that's what we're doing, or not).