Five takeaways from DistribuTECH February 8, 2011

The Oracle cars and Elster bike cabs crossing paths in front of the San Diego Convention Center confirmed the hype surrounding DistribuTECH 2011 last week… and that people were tired of walking. I took a break from traversing the USS Midway of San Diego exhibit halls to identify five trends from the show:

1. There are some really, really cool in-home displays and home energy management companies out there. But there’s also that pesky problem of many customers not really caring about their energy usage. Until customers are engaged, the amount of coolness exuding from these displays is limited to exhibit halls. As futurist Daniel Burrus (more on him later) noted, “Utilities need to be a trusted advisor to the customer. Customers need more than data. They need knowledge and wisdom.” In other words, utilities need to emulate retailers like Best Buy. But Best Buy targets certain customers. Utilities serve everyone. Big difference.

2. Smart meter safety concerns aren’t going away. It’s time to accept that. You can’t prove a negative to some people. Remember when your grandparents said not to sit too close to the TV because of the radiation? Eventually, people realized they weren’t growing second heads, tests weren’t necessary and it just sort of went away. The process, as it relates to smart meters, could take years, though. One security break or misstep with the customer’s data privacy, however, would destroy all trust. That’s why data security and privacy ranked only behind customer engagement as the hot DistribuTECH topics.
(Side note: I heard one instance of a customer complaining about a smart meter when they didn’t actually have one, and another accuse a utility of putting a hidden camera in the meter.)

3. It was a big week for outages. Portland General Electric’s vice president of distribution services, Bruce Carpenter, who has led one of the most successful smart meter rollouts in the country, said that no marketing message worked better with residential customers than “outage restoration will be faster.” That’s a nice little message to pass along to customers after the recent outages we’ve seen across the nation this winter.

4. As the electric vehicle guy here at Chartwell, I stopped by the REGEN Energy booth after hearing that the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power was evaluating REGEN’s technology for electric vehicles. REGEN developed wireless controllers that, when activated, detect each other and negotiate the best times to turn the equipment on and off. EV loads, for instance, would cooperate and communicate with each other in a decentralized manner. It’ll be very interesting to see how this works at LADWP.

5. We still don’t have a clear definition of the smart grid, and that’s a problem. Burrus said he’s seen more than 30 definitions of the smart grid in various presentations, some more than a paragraph long. “I want a picture,” he said, “then I’ll pay attention.”

With more than 8,000 attendees and 400 exhibitors, the industry is certainly paying attention. Let’s see if customers will come along for the ride.