Going to the Europe to see whats going on

Posted by Terry on 5 November 2009 | 0 Comments

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I'm going to the Europe to see whats going on this month. I'm off to UK & Europe at the end of November to meet with clients and to understand how Europe is doing at the moment and where they intend to move with distributed power generation and smart meter use. It will be interesting to compare where they are to New Zealands approach.

NZ's move to smart meters is being driven by the power companies not the government, a fact which concerns the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. Her report on smart meters (tabled in Parliament in June 2009) criticises the Government for allowing utilities to roll out dumb meters, meters that only deliver the smart part on the supply side (automated reading, dynamic pricing etc), also in NZ there are no feed in tariffs so the incentive to make use of the smart meters 2-way ability is not there.

It will be interesting to see the European view. I note that the UK government has decreed that every home will have a smart meter by 2020 but again the consumers are saying, whats the benefit to me (see the comments on the BBC web site!)

As part of my trip I will be attending

and I'm quite looking forward to seeing ow far along the UK are with both distributed generation and smart metering.

We at Cortexo (like most industry players) think these systems go hand-in-hand. The much vaunted Smart-Grid, but there is much more, much more of whats in it for the consumer and other stakeholders and this is the bit that's missing at the moment. The power industry need to understand a couple of simple points;

  1. Consumers don't trust them (utilities)
  2. Consumers want (a sense of) control
  3. Control comes from being able to decide who you buy power from, how you use it and even generating it yourself

Energy utilities are seen by many consumers as a monopoly that charges what they like for something you don't know the cost of till some time in the future. Its frustrating for the home budgeting process! But if the consumer saw day to day, hour by hour what they were using, on all their various power consuming components then what a benefit that would be. Also if they could switch providers to make the most of energy prices that suited their lifestyle what true control that would give them.

This is the promise of smart meters, but its coming too slow. Utilities say, the consumer wont pay for demand side monitoring. There no agreement on standards for Home Area Networks (HAN), no utility want to develop the wrong demand side product.

Solution? You bet, this is where the utilities should engagewith software companies like Cortexo (and there are many others) working in the area of Demand side management. Opening connectivity to outside 3rd party players like us allows innovation to flourish and reduces risk to the utility (if you like it carry on, if you don't cut it off). Let us worry about attracting the consumer and making revenue, just reap the rewards of being able to offer your customers (and potentially your competitors customers) more products and better service  for minimal investment.

I'm looking forward to telling potential partners in Europe that Cortexo has a platform provided as a service that can connect and control power generating or power consuming devices in the home giving the home owner more control and the utility the ability to deliver a granular supply side management of peaks etc, not the sledge hammer approach of "all hot water off" (like NZ's ripple control system), but smart control such as "turn all hot water cylinder withmore than 50% hot water energy off now along with all refrigerators for the next 10 minutes.

This field is going to get very interesting, I'll let you know what I find.