The electricity industry has rapidly evolved over the past five years with the entrance of new energy service providers that complement utility customer services such as cable operators, telephone companies, security companies and retailers. As modern technology continues to be integrated into the grid, it is crucial that utilities educate and engage consumers.

It’s been proven that consumers are most satisfied with their energy provider once choices are made available to them. However, it’s also proven that most consumers have limited knowledge about modern grid technologies and processes.

In fact, according to Parks Associates, consumers think energy management solutions will be inconvenient while not saving them enough money. Service providers should therefore consider selling energy management within a bundle of other smart home features, rather than as a stand-alone service, in order to increase buy-in.

Currently, only about 20 percent of customers have a time-of-use plan. Parks Associates found that consumers are open to variable rate plans if the financial risk is eliminated. So, technology vendors are encouraging utilities to run pilot programs that will show tangible adoption results, allowing vendors to appeal to regulators for subsidies to pay for such technology.

During last week’s Smart Energy Summit, I delivered a presentation about Transactive Energy, under development by the GridWise^® Architecture Council, a balanced team of 13 experts representing the many constituencies of the electricity supply chain and users, providing industry guidance and tools for implementing smart grids. Transactive Energy (TE) uses a combination of market forces and control techniques to achieve grid balance automatically as distributed energy resources, including renewables, proliferate.

As chair of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) Home-to-Grid (H2G) committee, I ensure we focus on communications between service providers and home devices. We’ve just released a whitepaper, Broadcast-based H2G Communication Solutions, which discusses a simple method to deliver energy management data from a power utility or energy service provider to consumer products and explores a new paradigm for the consumer-centric use of broadcast tools.

Submitted by Dr. Kenneth Wacks

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