Customer Acceptance - Part 2

An article came out in the NY Times this week talking about this very issue.

It seems that smart meters are being installed in California and other places and it is starting to dawn on the customers that the power companies want to control the customer's usage. In addition, the idea of real-time pricing is coming up too and that is making consumers nervous. So it boils down to the consumer thinking: "What's in this for me?"

This seems to point to what I said before about the power companies not doing enough to educate their customers about the benefits to the consumer of these new smart grid technologies. It just seems to be all about the power company saving money.

I remember listening to a local radio talk show host talking this week about the already existing CoolKeeper program (the power company can shut down your A/C when demand is too high) - His point being, why should we just trust the power company to control our A/C when they could be just turning it off because they might sell their power to California at a higher rate than they would get from us at that time. The radio talk show host suggested that the power company needs to share more information with us about why they are 'pulling the plug' on our A/C's. Is it really because demand is getting close to available supply or because they can make more money selling their power elsewhere or avoid paying for much higher priced power at that moment. This appears to be pushing the burden of sacrifice on the consumer to the benefit of the power company.

So, it would seem, that smart grid technologies and demand reduction programs may require a new level of transparency, education, marketing, and public relations than the power companies have been used to doing -- several orders of magnitude higher.