Smart Grid Library

Games are identified as one of the biggest trends for social media and mobile devices.  Gamification is called the next big thing for marketing.  Both have exciting implications for behavior change in the health care sector.  So will social games and gamification play a significant role in changing consumption behaviors for electricity, gas, and water?  [...]

The Smart Grid delivers disruptive technologies and services that will impact the entire electricity value chain of generation, transmission, distribution and consumption- meaning utilities and consumers.  Utility operations in generation, transmission, and distribution will be disrupted as work processes, business models, and service expectations change.  Overall, these disruptions are beneficial.  For instance, utilities know that [...]

Proxy Demand Response (DR) is a creative program that can be used to offset the need to build expensive peaker plants and help with the management of renewable sources of energy that are intermittent in nature, like wind and solar.  While the wholesale market has been operating in other states and later this year in [...]

Microgrids are natural innovation zones for the Smart Grid because they have experimentation scalability and flexibility.  Smart utilities could create partnerships with academic and business campuses in their territories to deploy microgrids and study the most effective solutions for management of distributed generation.  Why distributed generation?  Because smart utilities should leverage the abilities of microgrids [...]

Do you know what demand response is?  If not, don’t worry – unless you are employed by a utility, it’s probably not a term you’ve seen or heard before.  It is utility-industry terminology for certain types of programs targeted to customers.  Here’s the Smart Grid Dictionary definition of Demand response programs:  “Utility programs designed to [...]

Update on the CEC TV Energy Efficiency Standards There was plenty of “whine” on November 4, or to be exact, at 4:55PM on November 3, when the CEA sent a 91 page document 5 minutes ahead of the 5:00PM deadline for comments on the California Energy Commission’s (CEC) proposed TV energy efficiency standards. In order [...]

The developing Smart Grid portends opportunity and risk on both sides of the meter.  I spend enough time rhapsodizing about Smart Grid opportunities, so its time to look at some of the risks.  For customers, which could be utilities or end users, there are risks in selecting solutions that lack interoperability.  Will the smart meters a utility [...]