Method and system for automated monitoring of the production and/or consumption of meterable substances or thermodynamically quantifiable entities, including power and energy

Embodiments of the present invention are directed to automated metering and monitoring systems that monitor consumption and production of various consumables, such as electrical power, gas, water, and other such consumables, within physical sites and locations as well as within more abstractly defined and specified regions. The automated metering and monitoring systems of the present invention record production and consumption data, over time, at high granularities or, in other words, at short time intervals, so that near-continuous consumption and production of consumables can be recorded, transmitted, processed, and displayed for arbitrarily-selected time intervals. In certain embodiments of the present invention, monitoring data is collected and stored, at intervals of minutes, seconds, or fractions of seconds, in electrical memory and transmitted, through the Internet or other data-transmission media, to remote computers on which the data is processed for storage, analysis, and/or graphical ...