Never mind the granny image – there really is nothing like a good game of buzzword bingo.

Staying up late into the night to watch the 2010 general election on telly, I remember printing off bingo cards for my housemates and knocking back a slurp of beer every time the presenters said, “It’s an historic night for Britain” or “Who will hold the keys to number 10 by this time tomorrow?”

Minus the boozing (Ed – really?), I could have played the same game in Birmingham this week at the Energy Event when ELN decamped en masse to cover the annual maelstrom of consultants and suppliers.

Never mind the now ubiquitous ‘smart’ – smart grid, smart energy use, smart meters, smart what? That’s so 2012.

The NEW word of the moment is – drum roll please! – granularity.

OK, so it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. But that sneaky, five syllable noun persistently crept into conversations in Brum, like a kitchen salesman hoping for a new customer.

But we’re not talking the polished granite of your kitchen’s new work surfaces. So what on earth does it actually mean?

Whack it into a technical context and it’s about “the scale or level of detail in a set of data”, according to the word geek’s bible, the Oxford English Dictionary.

If I heard you say “Come again?”  I wouldn’t be surprised. In the energy world, you can translate that as how much information about your energy use you can harvest.

The word is a sign of the times – that it’s not just the size of your energy data backlog, it’s how you use it.

So what other buzzwords do you find yourself using again and again? Let me know – perhaps we can get a bingo game going at Energy Live 2013.

For now, I’m off to strategically pick the low-hanging fruit in my garden…