Via Tyler Hamilton’s Clean Break blog, some insightful comments on industry’s “marketing” of smart meters and how utilities may have erred in positioning meters as consumer friendly nodes of action instead of important – but decidely unsexy – infrastructure investments. As we have discussed here, smart meters and smart grids without smart markets are a recipe for consumer disappointment and disengagement. They are part of the “plumbing” which can help movitvate consumer change, but not the compelling call to action that – we believe – smart markets are. As the article notes:
“… there’s true division within the general public on whether smart meters are consumer-friendly gadgets that encourage conservation or utility-friendly devices that make it easier to gouge consumers. My take is that electricity prices are going up whether we get smart meters or not, and that smart meters — and the applications they enable — offer households a way to shift and even lower their electricity use to buffer the impact of rising prices. The mistake — and again, just my view — is that smart meters have been improperly marketed to consumers as some kind of sexy wonder tool that will help them lower their bills. Instead, utilities should have downplayed the introduction and simply moved ahead with their installation as part of a less exciting grid modernization play — equivalent to a telecom company upgrading from analog to digital networks so that, down the road, new services can be offered to customers. Customers don’t care about the bandwidth, they just care about the handsets and what they can do.
By positioning smart meters as more of an infrastructure play the cost of deployment can be simply incorporated into annual capital budgets and households are more resigned to the fact that getting the new device is mandatory. Let’s face it, initially smart meters are about helping utilities manage their networks better — i.e. they can pinpoint problems and do more detailed analysis of individual household, neighbourhood, and community power consumption, improving system planning and maintenance operations and preparing utilities for increased distributed generation in their service territories.
By making this seem like some gift to consumers, as has been done, utilities open themselves up to consumers expecting certain results and wanting the option of getting or not getting the smart meter. I witness this every day in the e-mails I get and conversations I have with disgruntled Toronto Hydro customers. Later, once the smart meter infrastructure is in place, the utility can begin deploying the in-home monitors and Web applications that allow customers, on an optional basis, to better take advantage of time-of-use pricing and demand-response programs. This, of course, needs to be preceded by gradual price hikes that are blamed on the rising cost of new generation and grid renewal so that consumers more clearly see smart-meter-enabled applications as a way to offset those inevitable increases (which are simply the reality of our times, not the cause of smart meters)…”
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