A lot have been written about national energy policy by using analytic thinking. As suggested by Albert Einstein, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Instead of analytic thinking, synthetic thinking, as it is done by architects, will help us solve the national energy policy problem.
The two commentaries Is a National Energy Policy Possible?and We Have a National Policy ... or Not raised by Bill Opalka in www.renewablesbiz.com, can be responded in a very simple way. The answer is how the energy policy impacts a nation, not how it impacts one the subsystems, like the Transmission System (TS) or the Smart Grid (SG), as it is currently being done.
In the post Huge Value Destruction as Disruptive Technologies Impact the Smart Power Service, I introduced for the first time the idea of the emerging holistic Smart Power Service (SPS) to the EWPC Blog. The SPS is different from the Traditional Power Service in that demand is not longer an externality. The SPS become increasingly important as we shift from the guarantee of cheap energy to that of cheap information.
The late Dr. Russell Ackoff deserves most of the credit of this whole post. According to Wikipedia he was a pioneer in the field of operations research, systems thinking and management science. Dr Ackoff suggested a system principle based on synthetic thinking, which I translate to the following using as examples the SG or the TS:
National Energy Policy: I only improve the SG or the TS in a way to improve the whole Smart Power Service (SPS) for the nation as a whole. Dr. Ackoff even suggests that if we can make the SG or the TS worst and make the whole SPS better we should do it. The National Energy Policy should be used to build the best SPS not necessarily the best SG nor the best TS, as it is being erroneosly done by using analytic thinking.
Under the EWPC-AF there are two structuring levels. The energy policy level separates the SPS in two weakly coupled and highly cohesive subsystems: a primary regulated delivery subsystem which I understand should evolve as the SG, and a complementary business system, in which emerges the architecting competition level.
In that second level, Second Generation Retailers (2GRs) compete in the retail and wholesale open markets to develop ongoing business models, following the well know Silicon Valley Model, which changes the discussion from one to regulate the need to deploy smart meters to another about letting the market realize SPS value, while empowering the customer to freely decide.
José Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio, Ph.D. - LinkedIn
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