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

Evolving Water Markets

Two articles looking more carefully at water rights trading and their potential role in helping address resource shortages.  Thus, not a smart grid solution per se, but a further endorsement of the role that smart markets and trading can play as a means of helping alleviate resource shortages.  The first via the New York Times: […]

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The Changing Architecture Of Electricity: Developing Smart Grids

Courtesy of STRATFOR (subscription required), an interesting look at the architecture of electricity: The basic architecture of distributing electricity to end consumers has changed little during the past 100 years. Still, technologies have slowly evolved over time, and in the last decade the concept of a smart grid has emerged. While there are different definitions […]

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Energy Efficiency Finance Gains Traction

Via Yale’s Center for Business and the Environment, interesting commentary on energy efficiency finance, one aspect of a truly smart grid: The question of whether energy efficiency finance has finally arrived in scale was a major point of discussion at the 2014 ACEEE Energy Efficiency Finance Forum on May 11-13 in Washington, DC. Both the […]

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Forward Water Markets

Via Waterfind, an interesting innovation in Australia that further develop a real-time “smart” market for water: Envisioned primarily as a market mechanism to enablesclients to remove water market uncertainty and plan for future irrigation requirements, the ‘Waterfind Forward Water Market’ is an extension of the current spot market, enabling the contracting of temporary or permanent […]

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Forget Utility 2.0, Let’s Talk Energy Ownership 2.0

Via the Institute for Local Self Reliance, some commentary on the concept of energy ownership – a fundamental tenet to the idea of smart markets: The transformation taking place in the electricity system is enormous, but twofold. But most commentators – including the former FERC chair – miss half the opportunity when they fixate on […]

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Using A Price Tag On Carbon As Part Of A Climate Rescue Plan

While not exactly what I’d call a “smart market”, an interesting look via the New York Times at some of carbon permitting & trade mechanisms being activated around the world: Bryan T. Pagel, a dairy farmer, watched as a glistening slurry of cow manure disappeared down a culvert. If recycling the waste on his family’s […]

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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.