This is another comment posted under the EnergyPulse article Characterizing and Quantifying the Societal Benefits Attributable to Smart Metering Investments (please hit red hyperlinks), by Bernard Neenan, Technical Executive, EPRI

First posted on the GMH Blog on April 8th, 2009.

Dear Mr. Neenan, Mr. Levy, and Mr. Gould:

As the global financial crisis is calling for the new order to shift from financial deregulation to more regulation, the power deregulation reform crisis solutions, at the beggining of the century, left us with a counter reform with excesive regulation. An stable reform framework that enables innovations is required and has already emerged for the new order.

Since Mr. Bernard Neenan has not responded (see Is Roger Levy Suggesting Reform?), readers could take a look at an environment in which there is a balanced market regulation reform. Just as Mr. Neenan approach is biased towards excessive regulation, other unstable approaches, that leave end customers on their own, are bound to replicate the biases toward excessive market unbalance of the deregulation experiments, which are unaceptable in the new order.

To learn about the balance market regulation emergent reform, please take a look at the EWPC article Forget Demand Side management (DSM); Think Demand Side Innovation (DSI), which complements the Energy Pulse article Does Smart Grid Make Utilities Smarter?, by Hahn Tram. In his article, Mr. Tram questions the capability of customers and utility's Customer Service Representatives to make the grid smart, which lead to the need of DSI.

The summary of said EWPC article states “To make the emergent power industry smarter, there is a need to restructure the power industry to enable Second Generation Retailers integrate the require demand side innovations to power system planning, operation and control.