The Smart Grid is Coming! What’s a Smart Grid?

Several hundred utility executives, government regulators, and engineers have gathered in downtown San Diego this week for a three-day conference that is focused on what may be the utility industry’s biggest paradigm shift since the Tennessee Valley Authority electrified the Southeastern United States.

The only problem is that it’s the biggest paradigm shift that people have never heard of.  A Harris Poll recently highlighted the fact that U.S. utilities have committed billions of dollars to upgrade the electric grid by installing new “smart meters” in homes and businesses. But the Harris Poll shows about two-thirds of Americans (68 percent) have never heard the term “smart grid” and 63 percent don’t know what a smart meter is.

So for at least some people, you got it here first: Instead of merely tracking how much total electricity (or gas, or water) a customer uses each month, a smart meter tracks a customer’s usage continuously throughout the day and uses wireless technology to automatically transmit the data in real time to the utility. This automated meter reading technology makes it possible for regulators to set prices that vary at different times of day—and which encourage or discourage consumption—based on the relative cost of power production and periods of peak energy demand. As the Harris Poll shows, if the price of electricity changes according to how much it actually costs to produce, three out of four people want to be able to see and control how much electricity they are using.

So why are smart meters a big deal? And why should technology innovators care? A few highlights from the “Metering America” conference are in order:

—In California, the big three investor-owned utilities are in the process of deploying 12 million smart meters, covering about 80 percent of the state’s population at an estimated cost of $4.5 billion, according to Commissioner Nancy Ryan of the California Public Utilities Commission. Ryan told the “Metering America” conference that utility rates based on time-of-day pricing related to the cost of producing electricity must be coupled

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.