Anatomy of a successful smart meter rollout
I had the pleasure of moderating a webinar yesterday, titled "Communicating Smart Meter Value," which tapped the experience and expertise of two valuable sources.
Monique Austin is Austin Energy's client relationship coordinator and Judith Schwartz is founder and principal at To the Point, a tech marketing firm. (We've previously interviewed Schwartz on customer engagement.) They brought disparate but somehow dovetailing perspectives on how utilities can prepare customers for smart meter rollouts and how to communicate the value of those meters—even when that value is yet to come.
We also polled our audience of utility personnel from around the country on two crucial points, the results of which I'll share.
Briefly, for background, we know that around 16 million smart meters have been installed in the United States so far and around 34 million more will be installed in coming years. (These numbers are a subset of the 150 million residential and commercial meters across the country.) A little more than 1,000 complaints each in Dallas, Texas, and Bakersfield and Fresno, California, led to blazing headlines and pushed respective public utility commissions to arrange third-party testing of those meters for accuracy.
In both cases, the meters and back-end systems passed with flying colors. Not so the processes used by the utilities involved on customer education, outreach and complaint handling. That's why it was so valuable to hear from two sources about how to do it right and the importance of communicating value to consumers as the industry moves ahead.
First, for today, the results of two polls we conducted, then highlights from the presentations.
The first question to our audience was a true/false statement: "Smart meters on residences are necessary to achieve the goals of a smart grid." Fully 84 percent said "true," only 16 percent said "false." Is this answer merely conventional wisdom? Or is it, as I believe (with no data to back my gut instinct), a reflection that the potential load shifting and shaping that might result too great to ignore? (With the added benefit of an engaged populace that sees advantages to participating in national goals such as cleaner skies, perhaps even energy independence.)
The second poll question was a statement with multiple choice answers: "The biggest unresolved issue related to smart meters is:" a) who pays for them, b) data privacy, c) defining their tangible consumer benefits. This last option was the overwhelming choice, with 74 percent favoring it. (Who pays garnered 11 percent, data privacy, surprisingly, only 15 percent.) Again, whether these responses reflect conventional wisdom, a self-selecting audience that needed answers on communications strategy, or some other motivation I leave you to ponder. (Our utility audience might be, for instance, underestimating the importance of privacy issues.)
Monique Austin from Austin Energy (got that?) provided a look at how her utility has created and implemented a thoughtful, high-touch program for rolling out smart meters. Simply put, Austin (the person) put together a cross-departmental team that included the utility's top customer service representatives, even outside contractors and vendors. They called it the "Cross Dock Deployment Team," in part because they all met at the end of every day during the rollout on a loading dock where smart meters and explanatory literature were stored.
That team had liaisons with every department in the utility, becoming the hub for 400,000 meter installations and, thus, a massive effort to communicate with and address the concerns of the utility's entire service territory.
The rollout itself was preceded by extensive customer outreach using every means possible, including a website, postcards, phone calls, news coverage, educating all utility personnel and working with community partners and social service agencies to consider the needs of low-income and life support customers. The utility's customers knew the meters were coming, why the utility was installing them and were notified by a door hanger that the work was done or had hit a snag. A special phone number and call center was set up, using a handful of bi-lingual customer reps trained in de-escalating angry calls, to field enquiries and complaints.
The stats tell how well the program worked. Of the nearly 400,000 meters installed, less than 11,000 customers called with questions or complaints. Of those 11,000, only 231 requested meter accuracy tests, which Austin Energy offered to do in person at the residence. Only 25 meters out of 400,000 were swapped out due to complaints. Austinites understand that their municipal utility will derive operational efficiencies first, and there's more to come in consumer value.
Since this is for real and not a fairy tale, Austin (the person) acknowledged that her utility is now engaged in communicating the meters' consumer value, as it approaches a pilot program that will include energy usage feedback and dynamic pricing for a subset of customers before a larger rollout.
We've discussed in this space the gap between meter installation and tangible consumer benefits—it doesn't necessarily have to be there and its existence is both an opportunity and a potential vulnerability. The dynamics around value messaging were covered by Judith Schwartz in yesterday's webinar, but we'll need to treat that separately in another column next week. Trust me, if you run a utility, you'll want to hear what Schwartz has to say on current research and practical wisdom on engaging your customers. She is participating in the National Action Plan that seeks to provide utilities across the country with a flexible messaging platform, for local tweaking, and she has invaluable insights to share.
Also next week, you'll be able to replay the webinar on demand by clicking here and looking for the title. I look forward to bringing you more insights and less conventional wisdom next week.
Phil Carson
Editor-in-chief
Intelligent Utility Daily
pcarson@energycentral.com
303-228-4757
Comments
Insurrections bad...
Thanks for your post, Jack,
So, smart meters aren't absolutely necessary, but an insurrection is likely if utilities go to direct load control? Okay, I think our utility audience is likely to equate that with "smart meters are necessary to realize the benefits of a smart grid."
Your point on the relative benefits of smart meter-related demand response is a good one, though. The grids with resource issues (if I get your point correctly) are likely to benefit most, in that regard. But you'd agree that the efficiencies of AMI (outage management, remote connect/disconnect, remote meter reading) still accure to all, no?
Regards, Phil Carson
Smart Meters Are Not Necessary
Phil,
Your question about whether "Smart Meters" are necessary to realize the benefits of the "Smart Grid" is a little more nuanced than a simple yes or no answer would indicate. Strictly speaking, the load shifting benefits can be realized with remotely controlled switches in a grid operator's dispatch center. Of course, customers will likely hate the idea and any program that attempts to install large numbers of these switches on every appliance where it might make sense to do so would face a customer insurrection of epic proportions. It's probably fair to say that most customers will want some way to control when and how their energy-consuming devices are switched on and off, even if that control is limited to programming some form of autonomous device.
Moreover, the meters themselves don't need to be smart. The just have to record energy consumption on intervals no less granular than an hour, and preferably on smaller time scales (15, 10 or 5 minutes). That's because the magic in a "Smart Grid" is a combination of some form of time-sensitive pricing that reflects system conditions and the ability to measure consumption on time intervals that match the granularity of the time-sensitive prices. Put a little more succinctly, it takes a combination of interval meters, Smart Devices that can be programmed to respond to prices, and dynamic pricing to make the "Smart Grid" work efficiently, and in a way that most consumers will accept.
There is another small matter that has received little attention thus far, and that's how long or short the grid in question is when it comes to resource adequacy. A grid that's overbuilt won't get much benefit from a "Smart Grid" until it's either time to replace existing generation or until demand growth uses up the surplus. A grid that's short resources (or faces an impending shortage) is likely to benefit sooner to the extent shortages are built into the on-peak dynamic prices that customers see.
As I've written before, dynamic pricing doesn't have to be mandatory and it should be offered with a hedge that provides the right monetary incentives to pay attention without leaving customers totally exposed to constantly varying and potentially highly volatile prices.
Jack Ellis, Tahoe City, CA