What do you get when you cross state public utilities commissioners, utility smart grid experts, smart grid equipment vendors and consumer advocates?
- Oct 20, 2010
- Tim Saffell
The punch line?  Well there isn’t really one. However, it did result in a great dialog about Smart Grid including consumer awareness and where and how smart grid impacts the consumer.
I attended the beginning of the Grid Week Conference in Washington DC this week. The theme for Tuesday’s session was the consumer. The sessions consisted of speakers and panelists from utilities, public utility commissioners, smart grid equipment and service vendors, and consumer advocates. That combination always makes for interesting discussions! One of the panels actually had Commissioner Sherman Elliott from the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) and Chris Thomas from the Citizens Utility Board (CUB)—a non-profit consumer advocacy group representing Illinois consumers. They both described how the Illinois utilities, Ameren and ComEd, had partnered with the ICC and CUB to develop an approach for a Smart Grid pilot that made sense for all parties. By building an approach that all parties agreed to, the utilities appear to have much better buy-in from consumers and communities. In fact, the panelists reported that ComEd has a backlog of communities who want to be next in the upgrade! Now that’s results that all parties should be proud of!
My colleague, David Shepheard, wrote a blog entry about a conference he attended earlier this year where the topic of customers barely came up. But isn’t Smart Grid really mostly about customers? Isn’t that why utilities exist is to provide the electricity necessary for people to live in comfort and do their jobs? The consumer is a consideration of nearly all decisions made by a utility. Granted, consumers may not see changes to their bills or different rate structures, but they benefit from upgrades to the distribution system. Those upgrades can include real-time monitoring, self-healing, and improved fault detection and isolation that benefits consumers through fewer and more isolated outages and shortage outage durations. Chris Thomas from CUB asked the question, “What price do you put on reliability?” He didn’t have an answer, but I think it’s an excellent question. Unfortunately, many people don’t value a utility’s reliability until they are without power.  Upgrades to the distribution system are mostly transparent to the consumer. Once it has been upgraded, they may not even realize that they are benefiting from it! No one is going to knock on their door and tell the consumer “You would have been without power for the last 12 hours as a result of the storm that blew through if we hadn’t upgraded our distribution system”. A utility may be able to show a decreased SAIDI, but try describing that to the average utility customer and it won’t take long for the eyes to glaze over.
To me that’s one of the biggest challenges is convincing consumers of the benefits of Smart Grid. A common point that consumer advocates raised was that the consumers must benefit from Smart Grid upgrades and that the utility and its shareholders should have some skin in the game when it comes to a Smart Grid investment. That’s the role that our regulators and the consumer advocates must play and have played. The most recent high-profile example of this is when the Maryland PSC didn’t approve BG&E’s Smart Grid program until BG&E was willing to commit to some operational savings that would be achieved by its Smart Grid investment. I think one can look at Xcel’s filing to recover the costs from their budget overruns for Smart Grid City as an example where the utility, consumers, and the commission weren’t on the same page. Only time will tell how that turns out.