Live from Eurelectric's Smart Grids Workshop: It's All about Consumers

It's nice when you unexpectedly meet an old friend, isn't it?

While sitting in a meeting at Eurelectric's "How will Smart Grids Change the Face of Europe's Electricity Distribution and Consumption?" policy workshop in Brussels this afternoon, in walked Richard Charnah, the technology director for AREVA T&D and a committee member for our POWERGRID Europe show coming up in Amsterdam. It was great to see him, and additionally delightful to get input from someone I trusted about what was discussed.

This afternoon, there was a lot of talk about the consumer. How to sell smart grids to the consumer, what the consumer is afraid of with smart grids, why the consumer needs to be on board with smart grids, ways to bring the consumer into the smart grid discussion.

I have to say, I was a bit disappointed. I'll be honest: Talk about the consumer is, in fact, a bit like an old friend---since I've heard it so much---but I don't care about the consumer. And, in a return act, the consumer doesn't much care about the smart grid.

The consumer is the part of the smart grid equation that just won't die. We don't really care about them; they don't really care about us (as a smart grid industry). Everyone really just wants to be left alone to do our own thing. Yet, still, we end up in the same room when anyone talks about changing the current power distribution system. It's like having to endure those hated relatives at Thanksgiving.

And, although the smart grid will have a lot of long-term societal benefits in making energy more efficient and bringing in more green power, we never, as an industry make the choice to sell them on a culture change. We always aim for selling it like a benefit to the wallet, like they will see so much more money and cost savings with the smart grid.

Well, sure, if they keep up with their own consumption and the time-of-use (TOU) rates. And, additionally, if they have the excess load that's both (1.) not immediately necessary and (2.) planned in advance to shift to cheaper consumption times. But, that's a bit like assuming every single consumer of the smart grid was an A+ science student and went to MIT. Some consumers don't want to track consumption, compare rates and plan ahead for use of dishwashers and clothes dryers.

Some of us are just not that good at organizing the little things like when I might need a clean plate or when I might run out of clean underwear. Not everyone in every classroom was an A+ student. I was in English, but not in math. And, seriously, I would hate, hate, hate to have to run numbers in my head every single time I thought about turning on the TV. While most industries, like the cell phone/smart phone peeps, are opting away from TOU stuff that made consumers angry because they thought they were being overcharged and, conversely, investing in large blocks of minutes and data plans, we're going the opposite way, joyfully assuming a desire among consumers to track graphs on energy use that I doubt is a real for any more than five people on the planet.

I really wish we'd stop talking about the consumer entirely. It's just not the most important part of the smart grid equation right now, but it seems to take up the most thought. So, if we must talk about those pesky consumers, if we must figure out just how to sell the average man, woman and child (be he or she residing in Africa, Asia, Europe or the Americas) on the smart grid, can we please NOT assume that said man, woman or child is going to be gung-ho in collecting, sorting and analyzing data---nor keen on super amounts of planning, either.

Let's sell consumers on the social benefits, the cultural benefits: renewables integration, fewer outages, better outage management, an overall more reliable grid ready to do things like plug in electric vehicles. Let's talk about the smart grid in terms of social benefits and chuck this concept that we can sell it in "pounds and pence," as I heard today.

If the consumer needs to be sold, let's appeal to their hearts and not their wallets because, in the end, we don't have enough control over how they manage, sort and plan their energy consumption---nor over their perceptions of cost---to accurately sell this in terms of coin.

Now, let's all talk about important things like standards and interoperability and let the consumer go back to a bit of evening TV without the fuss of figuring out if this is the right time to use power tonight to benefit our energy bottomline, shall we?