The history of innovations, whether these are in technology,
policy, or in how people themselves upgrade attitudes or
behaviors, offers resounding proof of a basic flaw in
arguments that naysayers constantly winge about solar, wind,
energy storage and other Smart Grid innovations. They
presume a static world where innovation trendlines don’t
exist and change doesn’t happen. O ye naysayers of little
faith, and even less appreciation of history and human
imagination. In the naysayers’ alternate universe, Edison
would not have commercialized the carbon filament
incandescent lightbulb and we’d still be using gas lights.
Edison himself said that he knew a thousand ways to not make
a light bulb – acknowledging the iterative,
knowledge-building process that led to his eventual
commercial success. Even today, the light bulb describes
brilliant ideas – the pictorial equivalent of Archimedes
shouting “Eureka!” in an ancient Greek city. Whether it’s
policy, technology, or people-oriented, innovation happens.
The
Smart Grid aggregates a number of game-changing
innovations to our existing electrical grid. It enables the
integration of renewable energy generation, energy storage,
and new consumer participation to create markets for
kilowatt and negawatt sales. It can radically re-configure
the value chain and put renewable generation at points of
consumption. It can enhance and improve operational
efficiencies and decision-making for electricity generation,
transmission, distribution and consumption. The Smart Grid
can become more reliable as well as resilient, improving
annual uptime and measuring average downtime (outages) in
minutes rather than hours. It can change our energy fuel
mix so we can eliminate the massive transfers of capital to
regimes that want to kill us and to corporations that poison
our environment.
These possibilities could take longer to realize because of
failures of imagination – but innovation progress, like
water, flows where it will. But the benefits that grid
modernization can bring to us are imperiled by business
sector failures in communications. The sector (utilities,
vendors, policy makers) has not focused on setting Smart
Grid project expectations with the most important
stakeholders -electricity consumers. Not the regulators,
not the stockholders. The consumers matter the most for
Smart Grid initiatives because they are voters, taxpayers,
and ratepayers. And if we don’t gain their support for grid
modernization projects, we all lose in terms of economic and
energy security.
From the typical consumer’s perspective, the Smart Grid is
all about smart meters. They don’t see the large scale
infrastructure upgrades to transmission systems to deliver
realtime situational awareness and avoid massive blackouts.
They are blissfully unaware of distribution automation
projects that improve equipment maintenance and reduce
outages. But smart meters have visibility to consumers.
And for most consumers, these meters aren’t delivering new
value to them NOW. The Green Button initiative is a start
in the right direction to deliver electricity usage data to
consumers, but for those of us who have had smart meters
since 2009, getting data now is truly delayed
gratification. (And for the anti-smart meter crowd –
spoiler alert – my smart electric and gas meters have not
increased my bills, damaged my health, or invaded my
privacy.)
It shouldn’t be this way. Telling stories through analogies
is a great way to deliver effective messaging. Most
everyone can relate to a home construction project. It
takes time from construction start to move-in date. Smart
meters lay the Smart Grid foundation for a range of benefits
that consumers will ultimately enjoy, but it will take time
and a number of intermediate steps to realize all of them.
Utilities need to develop and exercise multiple channels of
communication that deliver consistent and layered messages
to educate and enlighten consumers about the economic and
energy security benefits that a Smart Grid delivers. On a
national level, failures to communicate Smart Grid payoffs
to Americans could result in a second-rate electrical grid
infrastructure and reliance on extractive energy sources
that imperil our future as a superpower. That’s a future we
don’t want to imagine.
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