Kurt Yeager Talks with Smart Grid Today about need for consumer empowerment
In the May 19, 2010 issue of Smart Grid Today, Kurt Yeager talks about the need to empower consumers, implement intelligent policy reform, and encourage greater technology innovation.
Smart Grid Today (May 19, 2010)
YEAGER: US needs 'new electrical constitution' backing consumers
Galvin Electricity Initiative is promoting a “new electrical constitution” with principles intended to benefit consumers. To begin, all consumers should be provided with dynamic pricing rates and the incentives to take advantage of them, Executive Director Kurt Yeager told about 40 people gathered yesterday at a US Energy Assn workshop in Washington, DC.
This principle would allow open HANs, as opposed to those controlled by utility monopolies, he said. Municipalities should be able to access and invest in their power distribution infrastructure, but “most communities today do not have that ability unless they municipalize….They should be able to be treated as partners with, not prisoners of, their utilities,” he added.
A smart grid will create “a truly transactive network” that seamlessly connects producers and consumers, not one that “simply dumps” energy at consumers' doorsteps, said Yeager. “Today the business model should be based on the quality of service -- how we integrate supply and demand most effectively to best serve the needs of consumers,” he added. “That will provide the greatest value ultimately to the suppliers and utilities.”
A smart grid requires looking beyond the regulated monopoly business model to one that enables market-based retail services, Yeager explained. “This is the ability to get a home area network from Cisco or IBM. If I want to get a metering system from an independent provider, I can get it as long as it meets certain basic rules. I don't have to get it from a single monopoly supplier.”
Some consumers are getting “mixed signals” from some of the “so-called smart meters” deployed in the US that are not providing consumers with usable data, he said. Some of these meters are increasing the cost of service since they are still controlled by the supplier and are not managed through a partnership with consumers, he added.
Boosting consumer awareness, Yeager said, needs to be a top priority of the industry. “There is so much mixed communication out there today that most consumers say this sounds like another one of these disasters we went through in the 1990s with so-called deregulation….”
Reliability impacts jobs
Greater power reliability and job creation are among the benefits from smart grid deployment, Yeager noted.
“We are losing over a trillion dollars a year in this country in income through job loss, not all because of electricity but that is a major contributor,” he said. “When you talk to companies moving elsewhere or creating new opportunities in other parts of the world, they are doing it [in part] because the power system is much more reliable. We have one of the least reliable power systems in the developed world. Europe, Asia, developed parts of China all have substantially more reliable power system than we have today.”
The US needs “intelligent policy” that encourages innovation and unleashes the technology enabling the smart grid -- some of which has been available for almost 20 years, said Yeager. The policy needs to focus on the consumer and recognize that the core focus of the utility industry's modernization should be on distribution, “not on wind power in the Dakotas."
This story has been reproduced from the May 19, 2010 issue of Smart Grid Today with the permission of the publisher, MMI Inc. To view the full story on Smart Grid Today’s website, please visit http://www.smartgridtoday.com/public/1603.cfm?sd=31.
