Smart Grid in the Heartland: It's All in the Details
The Naperville City Council is in a bit of a quandary.
The news from Naperville is a mere blip on the screen of larger issues. But it bears mention here because it points, in a small way, to economic and other issues being raised by and on behalf of electricity consumers as smart grid projects move forward.
On a relative basis, the Naperville issue is small: a one-line budget item worth less than a half-million dollars in an almost $22 million project budget. Its delay won't do anything to hold up the entire smart grid project. To borrow a construction analogy, it's not the building of the house that's being argued, but how much it's going to cost to add the best roof possible.
The money for the entire project isn't being debated, nor is the project's need. Late last year, the City of Naperville was awarded $10.99 million in Smart Grid Investment Grant (SGIG) funds from the U.S. Department of Energy for its $21.99 million project to develop a smart grid energy management system. This is a city that 20 years ago adopted what the Galvin Electricity Initiative calls "a path leading to what is now one of the nation's first smart microgrids." It's ready for smart grid, and the federal government grant was welcome news to the city.
Given the smart meter backlash in other areas of the country, however, Naperville wants to do it right. And as a public municipal utility, it has specific fiscal responsibilities both to the city and to its citizens and customers.
So last week the Naperville city council tackled the thorny budgetary item of hiring a public relations consultant to educate the city's residents about the smart grid. The budget line: $464,725 over three years. The deliverables: a communication plan, a customer privacy and advocacy handbook, logos and branding for the Naperville Smart Grid Initiative, and the handling of public relations and resident education on how to best reap the cost benefits of the utility upgrade, and to explain its complexities.
The issue, as it turns out, is whether nearly $500,000 is too much to be paying for that particular line item. Council has directed the city manager to come back with cheaper alternatives, to be revisited in September.
If the budget line is lowered, that opens up marginally more to be spent on the rest of the project, or perhaps even on overages, if costs go up between now and April 2013, when the project's four phases and more than 57,000 smart meters are scheduled to be up and running. At that time, time-of-use structures will also be in place that more accurately reflect what the City of Naperville Department of Public Utilities is paying to buy power for its residents.
But the communications job is going to be monumental task in the coming three years. According to the Galvin Electricity Initiative's case study describing the Naperville smart grid project, most residents aren't aware that power the city purchases is much more expensive during the day than at night. So one of the first tasks at hand is to enable the city's consumers to better understand how they use electricity, so that they can seek ways to lower costs within their own households, and to learn how to use emerging technologies (such as secure wireless access to real-time electricity usage data) that will assist them with managing their energy costs.
Other utilities have found greater and lesser success in attempting to encourage consumers to do just that. Consumers have been habituated to look at the total monthly cost for total energy used, because that's the way utilities have been billing them for years. Electricity use has not been predicated on time of use, so it's difficult to begin thinking that way. Utilities across the country have been confronted the challenges of the task fairly quickly, and regrouped where necessary. It's no easy task, changing all of the rules for consumers, and expecting them to "get it" quickly.
And that, in itself, is going to be the biggest job facing the smart grid communications consultant the City of Naperville eventually hires, no matter at what level the budget for the position is finally set.
Kate Rowland
Editor-in-chief
Intelligent Utility magazine
krowland@energycentral.com
720.331.3555
Twitter: @katerowland2
Comments
Sometimes people just need something to complain about.
As I wrote in my blog, the City of Naperville and their public utility organization appears to be doing everything right in terms of engaging the consumer and articulating the vision for their smart grid initiative. They have been implementing a strategic plan to leverage technology to improve service for almost 20 years, long before the term smart grid was coined to describe what they are doing.
While there is broad public support in Naperville for the plan that the utility has put forth and for the impressive results that they have achieved over the years, there is a small but vocal minority that is opposed to any and all government spending in the community. They are now latching on to the cost of the consultant that Naperville wants to use to ensure that all stakeholders derive the maximum possible benefit from the current smart grid investment project and seem unwilling to listen to the many benefits that the utility and the city council have demonstrated will accrue to the residents. Naperville's creation of a Smart Grid Customer Bill of Rights was a direct response to earlier objections from this group. From my perspective, Naperville continues to embrace the process of public dialog and is working to actively address stakeholder concerns, even when those concerns appear to have no merit other than to try to build opposition to the project for misguided political ends.
Niall McShane
Arlington Heights, IL
Something to complain about
Niall,
Thanks for your comment. I've been following your blog closely, and the efforts of the City of Naperville.
I agree that it is often the small but vocal minority that you mentioned that throw a wrench into the works of an otherwise potentially successful project. Unfortunately, as we saw in the wind industry years ago, we're now seeing these vocal minorities fighting smart grid on any level in which they can hold things up. It's a shame, because there are people and groups fighting issues that really deserve to be fought, and they're getting lumped in with the NIMBYs and the BANANAs, and nobody wins.
Kate