It’s elementary, my dear Watson

IBM’s Watson robot triumphed on Jeopardy recently. While the geek guru of trivia stumbled a bit on the first day and had a tendency to answer really, really wrong when it was wrong and bet in odd, seemingly random cash sums, the computer came roaring back to leave the champion human contestants in the dust.

Did any of us really question that the computer would beat the humans at trivia?

Computers are like little digital elephants. They don’t forget. I once memorized all the U.S. presidents, their terms in office, their vice presidents, their major accomplishments and their major failures for a college class on American history. But, I’d be hard-pressed to remember much of that list today. The human brain doesn’t retain knowledge it doesn’t use often---at least, not very well and not completely or I wouldn’t have such trouble with maps of Africa.

If a computer “brain” had the gaps in it that my brain has (especially for presidents between Lincoln and Roosevelt #1), I’d be sorely disappointed in that computer. I’d think it a colossal failure if its digital circuits sparked and burnt out the way my organic ones often do.

But, Watson triumphed, and at least IBM cheered. Personally, I’m not sure what to make of Watson, exactly. I hear that the next stop on Watson’s smarter planet world tour, of sorts, is to help with medical diagnosis. Watson can take in and hold a lot of factors, facts, stats and charts that a human doctor cannot. I can see how that might be useful. But, Watson is lacking one thing you can’t ever teach a computer---human reasoning.

Yes, you can program Watson with all sorts of data. You can tell him that A + B + Ru + the speed of light over the square root of pie + a fever equals Z. And, when he sees A + B + Ru + the speed of light over the square root of pie and, by golly, a fever, he’ll cry, in rather digital tones, “Eureka, Z it is.” But, what if it only looks like Z? What if Z is the wrong answer and you have to work backward to find the right one? In Watson’s world, the answer must always be Z given those factors. Humans are a little better at realizing that factors and data aren’t the whole picture.

Still, Watson can be a great help. In our industry, IBM has pitched that Watson can assist with energy efficiency in the field and in educating consumers about use. (And, oh yes, kids and geeks alike will love learning via Watson. He’s like the world’s most advanced See ‘n’ Say.)

IBM also posits that Watson can help make decisions in utility control rooms, mostly due to his ability to understand “natural language” questions. This means you can ask Watson questions in English, and he can translate it, basically, into the digital format he works in. But, bear in mind that, essentially, Watson isn’t a native speaker of English. We natives talk weird. We drop syllables. We don’t form complete sentences. We each have our own way of speaking and writing; we complicate language with individual styles. Plus, words have subtext related to vocal inflection and context. In talking, we often get the gist of things, not every word. We grasp the overall concepts with language. We work in big pictures, and Watson sees in singular, linear details.

Singular, linear details are great for a computer, but not so great in a world built by humans for humans with human-caused and human-impacted problems which careen off the logical line in nifty and tangential ways.

Still, I will be very interested to watch Watson evolve in the field as he works with doctors and energy personnel. I’m sure he will continue to add to his extensive bit of knowledge---those details of facts and data and trivia. But, I really want to watch Watson move past the elementary item of natural language interface to something more analytical and more profound. If IBM can truly accomplish that, then as Ken Jennings noted during final Jeopardy with Watson, “I, for one, welcome our computer overlords.”

OK. Well, maybe I’ve seen the Terminator series too many times to go quite as far as Ken. But, I would welcome all the intelligent help we can get in power control rooms.

Bring on the rise of the power robots, IBM.

Study to electric utilities: Tell businesses the truth

J.D. Power and Associates released a report today on business customers’ reactions to power outages and outage management. While a bit happier and less emotional, overall, than their residential counterparts, there still seems to be a lesson in all these numbers: Dear utility, don’t shorten the outage time.

The J.D. Power and Associates 2011 Electric Utility Business Customer Satisfaction Study is based on interviews with people from 17,000 U.S. businesses that spend $500-$50,000 a month on those power bills. Those study Associates measured customer satisfaction looking at: power quality and reliability; billing and payment; corporate citizenship; price; communications; and, of course, customer service.

If the surveyed business had an outage, the average satisfaction rating was 729 out of 1,000 points---about a middling “C” grade for those of us still judging things based on old school report cards. And that “C” was only if the power clicked back on by the time told them. If the utility stretched the outage (for whatever reason, even those beyond their control) past the hour given by the utility, that grade plummeted to 576. (That’s a whopping 150-point plunge, and an “F” on the school report card scale.)

So, the lesson here: Be accurate. Tell the truth. Don’t give the best-guess estimate. The customer wants to know when it’s really going to be back up and making them money again. If it’s going to be a long time, be honest. And, let them know why.

The survey noted: Among business customers who contact their utility for information about an outage, satisfaction levels are highest among those who received at least three points of information. Satisfaction is lowest among customers who only received one piece of information.

“While causes of power outages may be outside the control of electric providers, they do have the ability to establish highly satisfying procedures for making adequate outage information available to customers,” said Jeff Conklin, senior director of the energy utility practice at J.D. Power and Associates. “Particularly for business customers, time is money. Providing accurate and comprehensive information about outages can help these customers make contingency plans and effectively plan resumption of their operations.”

The second lesson here: The customers expect you to know. True, you may not have the shiny smart grid intelligence to even get a bead on where the outage is without sending out some guys in a truck to just drive around the darkened spots. But, customers don’t know that. They hear a lot about the smart grid; they think you have one. They think there’s a robot or magic computer connection on that line. They believe that the very moment power goes out, you know. And they also believe you should know how long it takes to get that power back on. Whether or not you think that’s fair, that’s the business world you’re working in these days.

The study also noted a decline in overall satisfaction among business people with their power companies---not much, about four points, but that decline happened across a number of areas with the biggest dips in power quality and reliability (7 points) and customer service (5 points). Do you really have worse power than you did last year? Of course not. Do you have worse customer service? Perhaps. Either way, what’s important here is, again, what customers believe. They believe you know more than you are saying about outages. They believe your power is not as awesome as it was before, and they think your customer service isn’t so hot.

You can fix those beliefs with some extra time and extra communication, but the key is to be truthful and accurate---even letting them know when you don’t know. Sometimes honesty really is the best policy.

LIVE FROM DISTRIBUTECH 2: Let's talk EVs

In electric vehicle news today, researchers at Indiana University think Obama's "one million electric cars by 2015" dream will be shattered by car manufacturers who won't rev up supply because they don't think the American consumer will answer with matching demand.

The timing of this study's release is most interesting to me because I spent a good block of time today at DistribuTECH talking to ABB and ECOtality about their electric vehicle (EV) plans.

ECOtality provides EV charging systems. Last month, at the turn of 2011, ABB announced a $10 million investment in ECOtality. ECOtality, in turn, is leading the EV Project, a DOE-funded program to develop electric vehicle infrastructure with the deployment of 15,000 charging stations in 16 cities.

Murray Jones, vice president of global e-mobility at ABB, called this "range ready infrastructure" in our meeting today, which I found most intriguing---that someone is building out a basic highway charging infrastructure for EVs for a good road trip. Fleets of EVs are one thing. Distribution systems are circular, without a lot of miles traveled, and with a return trip to a central charging area. That may be how some businesses work, but that's not how the average American lives. Putting charging infrastructure along the road---at restaurants and retail outlets---and really developing an infrastructure to ease the mind of the consumer certainly seems like a step forward to getting the second wave of EV adoption, beyond the early birds that love that electric car for its ecology marketing or as a second car that cuts down on gas costs.

"We're building up a connected highway," said Jonathan Read, president and CEO of ECOtality, when discussing the EV Project that ranges across the West from Seattle to San Diego and has extensions into Arizona, Texas, and three cities in Tennessee. The ultimate goal of the EV Project is to take the lessons learned from the deployment of these first 8,300 EVs and related infrastructure to make it easier and faster to put in more---to Obama's one million and beyond.

To put those EVs on the road takes more than car companies or even consumer demand. It will take a ready, willing and enabled power utility. That's where ABB comes into the game.

Read added, "In each market, we have to work with utilities, and no one know utilities better than ABB."

ABB and ECOtality believe that those EVs on Obama's horizon are coming, and they want to work to make EVs a real asset to the grid rather than a "drag on it," as Read noted. Allen Burchett, senior vice president for strategic initiatives in North America for ABB added that it's obvious that EVs will have a major impact on the electricity distribution network, but, if utilities have more control over the timing of personal charging, it can be a positive impact, relaying on the intelligence of the charging infrastructure.

As for the Obama dream of a million EVs, Read believes that there may be as many as 1.5 million by 2015, exceeding Obama's vision. Perhaps those naysayers at Indiana University are wrong after all.

LIVE FROM DISTRIBUTECH: It's about the customer

DistribuTECH 2011 kicked off in San Diego yesterday (with a few pre-conference sessions and meetings beforehand) and from the co-located SGCC symposium to the keynote to my personal meetings, almost everyone is talking about the customer---and not just internal industry customers, truly about the end-use consumer (an idea rather foreign to traditional utilities who always had a bit of a monopoly and could simply assume demand without catering to consumers).

During the Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative's (SGCC) Smart Grid Symposium (also titled the "Partnering for Progress" Symposium) on Monday, debate about how much, how often, how nicely utilities need to communicate with consumers was the stuff of panel debates and paper releases.

SGCC released their 2011 State of the Consumer report to "shed light on what residential electric consumers want." What do they want? To know more, apparently---especially about the smart grid---if they have the values and priorities that fit into the smart grid overview. (The report noted that personal mores and hierarchies trumped age or income factors.)

When discussing this report and the motivated smart grid energy consumer at the meeting, SGCC Research Director Judith Schwartz noted, : The big picture may change, but the major players for change had to have passion, had to care."

Schwartz made the comment during a debate on customer wants and needs, acceptances and doubts.

But she found a bit of disagreement with Ahmad Faruqui, principal with the Brattle Group, who made the point that asking people what they would do in a situation and what those people actually end up doing in a situation when finally faced with it, are often very different prospects, which may be a flaw in reasoning out the psychology of consumer smart grid choices.

All the panelists, however, seemed to agree that bringing the consumer into the smart grid conversation was absolutely necessary since, really, the mainstream views of smart grid are often negative.

As panelist Craig Boice, president of the Boice Dunham Group pointed out, the most successful smart grid marketing, to date, was created by the opponents of smart grid in the San Francisco area who changed the community view of smart grid to a negative one in six to nine months time.

"The smart grid story we are telling, "Boice noted, "well, we just haven't found a way to get the customer into that story."

These customer-centric words were echoed in the opening keynote session of DistribuTECH the next morning by representatives from local California utilities and industry commentators and analysts.

David Geier, vice president of electric operations at San Diego Gas and Electric stated, "We can have all the great ideas in the world, but they need to align with and benefit our customers."

Lynda Ziegler, senior vice president of customer service at Southern California Edison agreed with Geier, noting that we, as an industry, have not yet incorporated educated consumers into the equation nor looked at areas consumers are really concerned with: cost, safety, accuracy, security and health issues like EMF.

"If consumers see no benefits to the smart grid, it will be difficult to move forward," she said. "We all have a role to play in the public conversation."

The industry conversation about smart grid continues this week at DistribuTECH. We'll be here in sunny San Diego until the end of the week---most likely talking more about the consumer. We'll keep you updated.

Additionally, our online editor, Jeff Postelwait, is onsite giving you the latest news from the conference. He's streaming that to the news section of the home page. So, take a look at the home page for a peek at the products, announcements, partnerships and collaborative projects from DistribuTECH 2011 this week.