Two recent articles of interest, both addressing the difficulties of articulating smart grid benefits to end-consumers. The irony of both is that they each take a roundabout way of identifying and recognizing that monetary signals would address the problem but then fall short of reaching the logical conclusion: smart markets in which saved units of water or power could be traded, sold, and donated per the desire of the individual or company who achieved the savings. The first, via The Energy Collective, muses on the difficulty of the situation as it stands now:
Many years ago, I used to work for one of the largest Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs) in the country. The employees understood that our main job was to keep the lights on, safely and affordably. There was also an understanding that most end-consumers don’t think about their electrical infrastructures until the lights are out.
This could not have been more apparent this past Sunday when the lights went out during the Super Bowl, leaving more than 75,000 fans in the dark at the Superdome in New Orleans. Not to mention the more than 100 million fans watching on TV from their homes and other venues. The 34-minute outage caught the attention of many in the nation.The next day I saw quite a few articles written about how a smart grid could have prevented the outage. Aside from whether or not a smart grid could have prevented this particular outage at the Super Bowl, this occurrence reminded us of the importance of our energy grid reliability. Most people do not realize how much reliance we put on our energy infrastructure to keep our lives and the economy going. Thus, occurrences such as this provided the energy industry an opportunity to make energy infrastructure conversations relevant to people’s everyday lives. The smart grid industry, especially those focusing on the grid reliability side, has seldom engaged end-consumers on conversations about grid reliability. Sure, grid reliability may not be an exciting topic for some, but it definitely is important. Some studies estimate that power outages cost the U.S. economy between $100 billion – $200 billion per year. Modernizing our electric grid infrastructure will help improve grid reliability and reduce both the number and duration of outages.
According to a 2011 Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) study, deployment of smart grid technology will deliver $1.3 trillion to $2 trillion in benefits. The benefits will include greater grid reliability, integration of solar rooftop generation and plug-in vehicles, reductions in electricity demand, and stronger cybersecurity. Another study from McKinsey estimated that the smart grid has the potential of delivering approximately $190 billion in annual benefits by 2019. The majority of benefits come from grid applications that improve reliability and from smart consumer applications that enable enhanced energy efficiency, demand response, and the integration of distributed energy resources such as solar rooftops and electric vehicles. Another EPRI study also predicted the ability of smart grid technologies to help lower power consumption, which in turn, lower greenhouse gas emissions. The study concluded that smart grid technologies would enable a transition to cleaner generation and reduced consumption that could reduce overall carbon emissions in 2030 by 58 percent compared to 2005 levels.
In general, the smart grid is still a foreign concept for most consumers. Many may even equate the smart grid with smart meters, because that is the only smart grid application they may have heard of. First of all, smart grid does not equal smart meters. Smart meters are just one application of the whole end-to-end Smart Grid. In contrast to merely smart meters, the Smart Grid connects the whole energy grid, from generation, to transmission, to distribution, to the meters, to beyond the meters — inside our homes and buildings — and extending all the way to distributed energy resources such as solar panels, energy storage, and electric vehicles.The Smart Grid will give our energy providers visibility into the way electricity is flowing, letting them fix problems fast. It will empower us with information on how we use energy, so we can choose to use it more wisely. It is our power, our choice.
When implemented correctly, with the crucial consumer engagement and education, smart meters and the Smart Grid are here to help us. Smart meters are good, but they’re only the tip of the iceberg. The next step is to extend that intelligence further into the grid, and into the home. We’re going to see a series of game-changing applications. Picture, for example, a charger for electric cars that automatically turns on when rates are at their lowest for the day. Imagine having solar panels on our rooftop that not only power our house but also feed any excess electricity that’s produced back into the grid — energy we get paid for.
It’s essential to articulate the value propositions of the smart grid. When consumers realize the benefits of the smart grid — not only for themselves, but also for their next generation — they won’t just want a modern grid, they will demand it. Understanding the power of the smart grid is the first step in unleashing it.
The second, courtesy of USAToday, has a very direct title which gets to the point immediately: Foes fight the tide of ‘smart’ water meters
Moves to modernize water utilities across the U.S. are coming under fire from opponents who say the costs will outpace the benefits of new technology.
At issue are smart meters, new devices that measure water usage digitally, then transmit the data wirelessly to the utility.
Industry officials tout their efficiency — utilities can save money by getting rid of manual meter readers, for one thing. They also say the new meters will help residents conserve water and monitor their own usage online.
“If I call in right now and I say, ‘My water bill went up by $100, why is that?’” said Chris McNeil, senior account manager with energy giant Siemens, which packages water meters with billing software. “There’s no system in place to be able to answer that” in cities with older billing technology.
Opponents, though, dismiss these as talking points with little basis in reality.
“That’s really twisted — because really they’re going to raise our bills,” says Maria Powell, an environmental scientist from Madison, Wis. “The whole premise that people are going to go online and look at their water usage day to day, it’s baloney. Most people aren’t going to do that.”
The opposition mirrors that of fights against smart meters used by electric companies. Residents have bitterly opposed electric smart meters across the country, with some success. StopSmartMeters.org, an advocacy group in California, reports that 13 city and county governments in the state have banned smart meter installations within their areas. The fight over meters in Texas has become so heated that the Public Utilities Commission keeps reports on smart meters prominently displayed on its homepage. Web visitors can read staff reports extolling the virtues of smart meters, alongside more than 600 collected filings on the subject, many of them petitions from opponents.
Pike Research, a firm specializing in clean technology research, cited the fights over electric smart meters in revising downward its own projections for the industry. But the firm still expects smart water meters to boom in coming years to an installed base of 29.9 million meters by 2017 from 10.3 million in 2011.
Delores Kester, also of Madison, complains that residents will bear high up-front costs, as utilities go about changing out thousands of functioning analog meters.
“It’s tough times for a lot of people,” said Kester, who organized a petition opposing the meters. “Atlanta had non-stop problems with huge water rate increases.”
Indeed, the opposition comes at a time when residents are spending larger and larger shares of their household budget on water. Costs are easily outpacing inflation, according to Fitch Ratings, a market research group. In the most extreme cases like Atlanta, residents are paying three times more for water today than they were 10 years ago, as utilities grapple with costly infrastructure needs.
Often when new meters are installed, bills go up even without a rate increase, because old meters can read lower levels of water than people are using.
When new meters were installed in Greenville, Miss., some residents’ bills doubled, increasing by hundreds of dollars in some cases, according to reports from a local newspaper, the Delta Democrat Times. And in nearby Jackson, Miss., smart meters are projected to generate $60 million over 15 years, money that will be earmarked for work on the city’s crumbling water and sewer system, according to city documents.
Opponents also complain of privacy issues, and they say the wireless technology used in them — which is not unlike signals emitted by your cellphone — can cause health problems. Federal regulators insist the signals are safe, and health researchers haven’t found a consistent link between radio frequencies and cancer, as opponents suggest.
Still, Powell and Kester successfully lobbied their public utility to allow residents to opt out of the new meters if they wish — for a $7.78 monthly fee.
“We might have wanted more if it was Christmas,” Kester said. “But we worked together to develop the policy that we have.”
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