High Tech - High Touch

 

Energy Pulse has published the article "Why (and When) to Invest in the Smart Grid," written by Jeffrey Leonard, CEO, Global Environment Fund. We believe that it is a good source to understand what their Fund is betting on. It is a crime to invest in the electricity business with old technology nowadays, since they will be replaced without getting a decent useful life. That will happen to most of meters that were installed by the distributors only 5 years ago. They change many of the meters that had been installed 8 years earlier. But technology alone cannot  get us far.

 

In that sense, I have placed the following comment to the article to signal the progress that must also be made on the human side.

This is a great article on the high tech side. The high touch side must also be developed, to aligned, for example, the incentives toward energy efficiency, high system reliability, and high local power quality where needed. The high touch side is a market, where customers can get differentiated service without average mandated rates, where every customer can have a minimum expected cost of electricity from competing retailers. Things like SAIDI, CAIDI, and SAIFI will disappear.That means changing from traditional price controls to prudential regulation of retail electricity services. We agree with the authors that the old utility business design will be dead soon enough. Without integrating a new retail market high touch design, the high tech side will be incomplete. High touch electricity must be a customer oriented electricity.