Courtesy of The Energy Collective, an interesting article on the position of consumers in the smart grid / smart meters roll out. We are in agreement with the author’s view on smart meters and their relative lack of utility (dare we say…), but we disagree with his overall somewhat pessimistic view on the primacy of […]
Read more »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 […]
Read more »As adroitly noted by The Energy Collective, Forbes has an article on smart meters, reporting that utilities – not consumers – are benefiting from these initiatives. As the article notes: “…Power companies across the U.S. have installed millions of home smart meters, devices that promise to intelligently cut power use, trim electric bills and ultimately […]
Read more »Courtesy of Earth2Tech, an interesting comparison between the telecommunications industry and utilities as they consider adding value-added services on top of the power network (like phone companies have rushed to do on their data networks) or if remaining content to provide the basic energy pipes. As part of our advocacy of smart markets and smart […]
Read more »Courtesy of Smart Grid News, an interesting article on whether smart grids need smart consumers, and – specifically – whether smart customers will need end-use pricing (they will). As FERC Commissioner Philip Moeller recently explained “…the “majority of the benefits of the Smart Grid [will be] at the retail level, when consumers have dynamic pricing.” […]
Read more »Courtesy of The Economist, an interesting analysis of the global movement to introduce smart grids. As the report notes, there is a substantial consumer element still to resolve: “…whereas cars, computers and so forth have become ever more sophisticated, power grids have remained, in essence, sets of dumb wires. Thomas Edison, a pioneer of electrification […]
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