Homeowners soon may be managing their energy consumption via Cisco’s Linksys broadband gear. The networking giant unveiled a deal this week that will see it lead a $1 billion smart-grid infrastructure buildout for Duke Energy (DUK), and Cisco (CSCO) tells us that for the consumer portion it will largely be deploying its own smart-energy home hardware, which includes Linksys products and “homeplug” devices that transfer data via power lines. Mark Miller, director of business solutions for Cisco, said the company has been working on various energy management products—some of them in the Linksys portfolio—for the last 18 months.

While Cisco previously told us it was developing energy management tools for the consumer, the Duke deal marks the first time we’ve heard firm plans to make such devices available via a smart-grid buildout. Duke didn’t say how many of its customers would have access to energy management tools, but the utility has 11 million people in its service area (4 million customers) and is rolling out smart meters to more than 1.5 million of them.

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