The authors suggest that smart energy management will be an important application area for pervasive computing, as the pressing societal need for a solution is clear and there is a close fit with technologies and approaches being developed under the pervasive rubric. They present five full papers, including a comprehensive survey spanning four decades of smart energy research, recent results from a UK study of home-deployed smart energy systems that involved both persuasive media and diverse energy-consumption sensing, nonintrusive load identification and estimation, and minimally intrusive load shedding. A short Spotlight article highlights the need to systematically integrate human management into the complex control schemes that these smart grid schemes will enable.