The panel “The Future of the Smart Grid: Early Lessons Learned from the Rollout of Smart Grid Technologies” at the Atlantic’s “Future of the City” conference couldn’t have come at a more pressing time: Earlier this week, the Maryland Public Service Commission shocked many by rejecting a major smart grid plan proposed by Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. To make matters worse, some are theorizing that Maryland’s decision could spark a trend, putting a serious dent in the planned deployment of smart grid technology.
As such, the panelists, including Mark Brownstein, Deputy Director of the Energy Program at the Environmental Defense Fund, and Paul Camuti, President and CEO of Siemens Corporate Research, were put in a bit of a tricky position — how do you discuss the future of smart grids when the concept was just dealt a potentially massive blow?
But discuss it they did, emphasizing that the Maryland decision was just that — one decision, that didn’t necessarily mean anything drastic or spell instant doom for smart grid technology. They also stressed that there’s plenty to be done on the public opinion side, such as increased outreach efforts to build public support for smart grid technology on a larger scale.[SButtonZ button="digg"]
Panelist F. Michael Valocchi, Vice President and Global Energy and Utilities Leader at IBM’s Global Business Services division, spoke to us after the event, and expressed regret that the Maryland news had dominated so much of the discussion: “The Maryland decision is very important, but there are other things happening. The one thing we didn’t get deep enough into is the consumer angle — how the consumer can and should be thinking about things differently.”
His point is well-timed — in an era of huge expansions in consumer choice, driven by technology, why are we still so deliberately naive when it comes to choices about how our utilities are delivered? We have the technology for consumers to see their energy bills itemized, similar to cell phone bills — so why isn’t there mass demand for this information?
“Right now, those of us in the energy industry think ‘push-pull’ – we are the ones are pushing the ideas in the industry,” Valocchi said. “But if you look at other competitive industries, there’s a lot that has happened the other way — the consumer pulls, then it happens because the consumer asked for it. We don’t see enough of that happening in [our industry].”
Valocchi stressed that IBM has been working to track consumer views through a series of surveys –this year, they’ll survey 10,000 people from around 10 countries to find trends in customers’ energy demands and preferences. “We have a Smart Grid coalition of 11 companies around the world that represents over 100 million customers,” he said. “They will do surveys in their service territories to get a feel for what the consumer is going to want over the next five years, so we can build a platform to react to that.”
As for improving consumer education here at home, Valocchi noted that one way to teach consumers is to get them while they’re still learning, by incorporating energy programs into the school curriculum. But most of all, there needs to be a movement to change the way we think about how our energy is delivered: “We as an industry need to reach out much more to the consumer side before we can get behind what are they thinking. Electricity has been invisible to consumers for far too long.”
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Image: oe.energy.gov
Hey,
Having read the article on the Maryland decision, it doesn’t seem so unreasonable. There was no provision for the consumer to monitor their energy-use in real-time (instead a potentially-complex system depending on the consumer having internet access was required). Additionally, the company was to levy a flat-rate surcharge for the meters, a disincentive for the company to control those costs, taking those rates out of the commission’s regulatory oversight, and effectively guaranteeing the company’s profits on the venture. It doesn’t seem unreasonable that the risks of the approach should be shared by consumer and supplier.
Or am I the one who’s being unreasonable?
Also, why would someone choose to install such a system and then use day-by-day pricing, rather than a system with a more frequent feedback loop?
Yours,
Jonathan
And there is a media blackout on the privacy implication of smart meters. The government will know when you turn on and use ever electrical device in your home, and can deduce from that everything that you do in your home.
Pete: just plug the grow lights into the clothes dryer socket.
Living in part of Maryland NOT served by BGE I watch this with great interest. BGE has succeeded in moving their power generation facilities outside the pervue of the PSC and has based their regulated rates to consumers on the ‘costs’ of buying power from their unregulated generating arm. They seem to put all their high cost maintenance efforts into organizations that are covered by the regulated rates thereby hustifying higher costs to the PSC while putting all their efforts into making the generating arm more cost effective so that they can get more (unregulated) profits. They have juggled the books so many times that there is absolutly no trust left in BGEfrom the consumers or the government regulators
This is interesting. The electric provider I work for here in Texas is deploying a ‘smarter’ meter project over the next three years with a DOE grant. One of the stipulations that the upper management decided was that there would be no rate changes after the meters are installed. While the time of day rate charges are an easy way to recoup high energy costs in summer during peak demand, I think the project can also see other optimization including customer control over their own power usage before the provider can start changing time of day rates.