A smart grid is a transactive grid.
- Lynne Kiesling
Author Archive

Water Markets: Not Perfect But Vital To Murray-Darling Basin’s Future

Via The Conversation, an article on use of water markets in the Murray-Darling Basin: Water markets have come in for some bad press lately, fuelled in part by the severe drought of 2019 and resulting high water prices. They have also been the subject of an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission inquiry, whose interim report released last year documented a […]

Read more »



An Expanding Pool of Liquidity In Water Market

Via The Economist, an article on how investors are starting to pay attention to water risk: From a small office in Montreal an artificial-intelligence business, Aquantix, plays sleuth for faraway investors worried about water risk. Its model combines high-resolution satellite imagery, weather-station data and regulatory documents scraped from the internet. It estimates not only how […]

Read more »



How the UN and Dr Evil Get Water Investment Wrong

Via Global Water Intelligence, interesting commentary on the role of markets and private investors in water: Every year in the January issue of GWI we do a survey of the growth of specialist water investment funds. We are expecting another big leap in assets under management in this year’s survey, which will be published later […]

Read more »



Time For Utilities To Embrace Decentralization

Via IWA’s Source Magazine, an article on how decentralized infrastructure can contribute to resilience: Applications for decentralised, or distributed, water and wastewater systems span a great deal of the managed water cycle, from capturing rainwater and stormwater through to wastewater treatment. Such approaches are gaining added impetus because of their potential as a response to […]

Read more »



Peer-to-Peer Electricity Trading and Blockchain: Enabling Decentralized Renewable Solutions

Via Energy Central, an article on how peer-to-peer electricity trading and blockchain enable decentralized renewable solutions: Peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity trading model was born as a consequence of the increasing deployment of distributed energy resources, increasingly owned by the end consumers. P2P electricity trading is based on an interconnected platform, that serves as an online marketplace […]

Read more »



Sydney’s New Flexible Water Prices

Via Medium, an interesting look at an innovative smart water pricing mechanism being used in Australia where the price of water in Sydney is now based on dam levels, enhancing resilience to climatic extremes while ensuring adequate revenue for capital expenditures: In water resource management, economic theory suggests that demand for water should behave like […]

Read more »


About This Blog And Its Authors
Grid Unlocked is powered by two eco-preneurs who analyze and reference articles, reports, and interviews that can help unlock the nascent, complex and expanding linkages between smart meters, smart grids, and above all: smart markets.

Based on decades of experience and interest in conservation, Monty Simus believes that a truly “smart” grid must be a “transactive” grid, unshackled from its current status as a so-called “natural monopoly.”

In short, an unlocked grid must adopt and harness the power of markets to incentivize individual users, linked to each other on a large scale, who change consumptive behavior in creative ways that drive efficiency and bring equity to use of the planet's finite and increasingly scarce resources.