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

Internet Of Electricity

Via LinkedIn, interesting commentary on the Internet of Electricity: While today we discuss how to integrate the rapidly growing intermittent Renewables Generation, and how Disruptive Technologies such as Distributed Generation, Storage and Electric Vehicles will reduce the value share of utilities in the electricity system, on the horizon one can already adumbrate the next big […]

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In Vermont, A Forward-Thinking Utility Is Helping Customers Share Solar Power

Courtesy of Fast Company, a look at how an interesting startup named Yeloha is making it easy to use the electricity from someone else’s—which could change everything about the grid: For all the growth in the commercial and residential solar market, with thousands of businesses and home owners now putting panels on their roofs, it’s still the […]

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Google and Friends: Killing Smart Grid / Cleantech Startups?

Via Greentech Media, an interesting look at the downside of Google’s “dabbling” in renewable energy: If you were to think of big companies from outside the energy industry that could be poised to radically disrupt the electric utility industry, Google (and its big-tech peers) would have to top the list. Google has, over the past decade, […]

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Amid Drought, California Experiments With Leasing Water Rights

Via TruthDig, an interesting look at how California is allowing limited use of market techniques to help address its water crisis: Last fall, farmers working the flat land along the Colorado River outside Blythe, California, harvested a lucrative crop of oranges, lettuce and alfalfa from fields irrigated with river water. But that wasn’t their only […]

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An Airbnb For Water

Via MotherJones, an interesting article on how the sharing economy could help solve California’s water crisis: Could the sharing economy help solve California’s water woes? Don’t laugh. A new tech startup has come up with a way to let farmers lease their extra water, much in the same way Airbnb enables homeowners to rent out […]

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A Papal Climate Error?

Courtesy of the New York Times, an interesting commentary on the moral conviction of a market-based approach to controlling greenhouse gas emissions in light of the Pope’s recent encyclical “Laudato Si” (discussed here) which – while forcefully urging action to combat climate change – specifically criticizes the sale of “carbon credits”: AMONG environmental activists, the international market for […]

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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.