What's so smart about my meter?

IT IS BECOMING INCREASINGLY CLEAR THAT CONSUMER empowerment will be one of the most powerful forces shaping industry change in the coming decade, and this trend will continue to become even more significant into the future. This new engagement that needs to occur with consumers, or end-customers, represents a tremendous shift for utilities, both in operations and in thinking.

Back in late May, I had the opportunity to moderate a media roundtable discussion about the fundamental change this kind of two-way communication means to how utilities will do business in the future. Entitled ''Helping Consumers Understand What's 'Smart' About Their Smart Meter,'' the roundtable featured a lively discussion between industry media and Ken Devore, director of Southern California Edison's SmartConnect™ program; Russ Vanos, Itron's vice president of marketing; and Mark McGranaghan, a director with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).

The discussion was wide-ranging, and delved into what this massive shift means, not only for the utility, but for its vendor partners, as well. All three of the roundtable speakers stressed that collaboration - from initial research and pilot programs all the way to deployment and consumer education and communication - is key to the ultimate success of the smart grid.

I'd like to share some of the highlights of this discussion, as it pertained to Southern California Edison's SmartConnect™ planning and deployment, and how the utility and its partners see the industry moving forward.

McGRANAGHAN One of the real positive things that SCE did for the industry is that they shared their use cases with the whole industry, and they really did a lot for pushing the topic of interoperability and standards forward in the whole industry. And that one act of sharing those use cases has really created a whole atmosphere in the industry that electric utilities are working together.

That process of starting from scratch and actually documenting what they expected to get out of advanced meters and sharing, rather than keeping it to themselves, has really opened up this whole discussion.

DEVORE We're moving through our stages fairly deliberately. We're not the first, we're not going to be the fastest, but we actually think that we're taking a very conscious approach to keep the customer in mind, communicate to customers that functionality, if you would, a kind of very strategic approach where we're trying to really communicate and educate customers based on what functionality we're delivering right now, and where we're going.

So we're trying to stage (deployment) so we can manage expectations, and hopefully we can manage what they think about the company in terms of our reputation.

We have installed about three-quarters of a million meters so far. A key milestone that we'll come to this fall is when we basically turn on most of the back office and we bring interval data gathering to life, we bring remote service switching to life, and a lot of those features that really are those basic use cases that built the premise in the beginning, the real value.

And we will stage our education and communication process hand-in-glove with that process of bringing that functionality to the market. So far, I think customers really reacted positively to that - either positively or with a little bit of indifference (they don't know what to think yet) - but certainly I think we're bringing them along on a journey that is a step-by-step journey. That has been very valuable. We've really been working in partnership with Itron to do that with key stakeholders and industry partners as well as end-use customers.

INTELLIGENT UTILITY As an industry vendor, the utility itself is your customer, not the end-use consumer. Can you tell us how this role is changing in the new energy environment?

VANOS We're focused on the customer. Our customer is the utility - in this case, Southern California Edison and some of the other utilities we've mentioned. The end customer was never really much in our purview, and so this is new ground for us.

So we are trying to be very collaborative with these utilities. We're trying to focus here initially on the end consumer, focus mostly on [questions like] how do we educate the end consumer, how do we share information on what utilities and their customers can do with technology in the new energy reality we are all encountering.

You've heard of the smart grid referred to as like the Internet in the fact that it's going to offer new ways for consumers to interact with their utilities, much as the Internet has done. The new energy future - with smart grid and two-way communications down to end consumers - is going to give you opportunities to get information, to make decisions, and to do business in new and different ways.

And so our focus is to work with Southern California Edison and all of our customers to help them with media, speaking engagements and white papers, but more importantly to really collaborate with them and their consumers on ''What are the applications that consumers want? What are the things that they're interested in, in terms of managing and using energy differently and more effectively?''

We're only at the beginning of this. It really is going to be generational. It won't be completed this year or even this decade. It's going to take lots of time.  Clearly the big thing here that's different is this notion of collaboration and partner systems, because it won't be built by one party alone.