Sharing the Smart Grid in Bits and Bytes

I don’t care what your momma told you, sharing sucks. I share a driveway. (My house was built in the 1920s before the great auto explosion in American culture.) I’m always courteous---painfully aware of keeping the driveway access open for the consideration of those people right next door. My neighbors, however, are not courteous. They take over. They hog. They plant their little rubber car feet in the driveway in multiples I cannot begin to describe---nor can I begin to describe how it irks me.

For two years, I’ve been overly nice and they’ve been overly nasty. After a particularly bad incident a couple of weeks ago involving a tan Malibu that blocked me in the drive for nearly two days, I stopped being so nice. Now, I wasn’t overly nasty, either. I didn’t block them in. I wasn’t quite that childish. Childish wasn’t going to help, even if I really, really, really wanted to be childish at the time. But, I did park in an area of the drive that was a bit “in the way” for them---just to give them a taste of what I’ve been dealing with daily for two years.

In less than 10 days, they were at my door to ‘talk’ about the drive and access---because it finally became a personal problem, an issue for them. They didn’t suddenly get the hint that they were being jerks. Nah. They never will. I had simply figured out that, to get even close to a compromise, I had to make it about them, specifically. I had to get them emotionally involved, make it impact their own daily lives.

I think Duke Energy learned a similar lesson about their smart grid Indiana plan: make it personal, make it impact the individual, and show them how it can benefit all to talk more about it. Forget greater good, energy efficiency and development for renewables. Target individual desires.

Duke’s Indiana plan for the smart grid was breathtaking---an over-arcing, 800,000-meter proposal that was a real beauty in its coverage, a showstopper. There would be a meter in just about every house and every business in all of the 69 counties Duke served in Indiana. A multi-pronged, five-year blueprint worthy of the Chrysler Building, really, Duke’s Indiana plan had all the bells and whistles a smart grid could ask for.

Duke packaged it up nicely, neatly and went along to the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission with the $450 million proposal. The Commission stopped the show literally. They denied the proposal. They weren’t impressed by the scope and breadth. They weren’t impressed by the technology. As a group in place to buffer costs and watch out for the consumer, they didn’t look at the beauty of the plan; they wanted to know, specifically, how that plan was going to impact them and their neighbors and the people they represent.

When they didn’t find the information they wanted, they said, “No way. Try again.”

That was last November. And it appears that Duke has learned my driveway lesson. (I always assumed the neighbors would want to be courteous to me the way I was courteous to them. Duke assumed that the regulatory commission would, to an extent, take their word about benefits with the plan. We both learned a painful lesson on trust and concessions. In the end, benefits to the individual must be laid out, spelled out, colored in and made directly, perfectly, crystal clear.)

This week, Duke returns to the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission with a new proposal---one that’s significantly smaller and involves a bit of lag time. Duke wants to put in about 40,000 meters and then read the data for a year, hoping to put together a good, solid argument at the end of that year for those regulators---hoping to show, in real numbers, those benefits to the individual.

We often assume---as individuals and as corporations---that a situation will be seen from our own point of view. Alas, in many cases, personal and corporate “blinkers” and “blinders” keep us from seeing anything but what falls directly into our own paths.

This psychology may need to be applied to the smart grid more often. Rather than the big picture approach, we may have to drive the path to a fully-realized smart grid in easier-to-digest, individual portions. To teach society to share, we might need to appeal to the self-centered individual preferences in all of us.