With the difficulty of traveling these days, I like to bring you insights from conferences around the United States. I have found the time between the conference and the flight home to be a good time to reflect on critical discussions from each conference. This week, I just had to walk down the street to attend the Autovation conference in Denver, Colorado. Interestingly though, I am actually still writing this report at the airport. I am on my way to another conference. Conference season is certainly here, so expect to see some more airport reports than usual this month.
Before getting into some good content, I have one caveat on my ability to cover this conference. As a press person, maybe I have just gotten too used to being treated well. For example, good seats at keynote presentations (even though I still hang out at the back) and more free conference chicken than I could ever want. Really, I am happy to scrounge up some food from a local gas station and sit in the back row or on the floor, but this conference definitely put up some roadblocks to keep me from doing my job of collecting and distributing information as effectively as I like to. Requiring some of my editorial colleagues to pay for access to the conference sessions and not allowing me into the exhibit hall at key times to conduct interviews made the conference challenging to cover, so below is my best given the difficult circumstances. I never thought that I would be as excited to get into an exhibit hall as I would be to get into a reunion concert with Led Zeppelin, The Beatles and Pink Floyd. Anyway, enough digression, the conference themes essentially came down to the fact that 2010 seems promising, 2010 will likely be the year of the consumers—whether they know it or not—and you should start listening to your toaster more often.
Remember in good old 2008, things were still moving along at a frantic pace. And then (I am not sure how to write out the sound of a toilet flushing, but use your imagination and insert that sound here). After going down the drain, the economy has taken a year-long sabbatical in 2009. Talking with people at this conference, however, there just seemed to be a sense of hope about 2010. Perhaps it is the federal stimulus handouts to the utility industry and, well, more federal handouts. Though the handouts still left big questions for many conference participants, including who would get the funding and how much would they get? Would it be sprinkled across the land, so everyone gets a little bit, or would the governments concentrate it on building out substantial projects? Also, when were the announcements really going to happen? Apparently, the U.S. Department of Energy is planning on making some sort of announcement at GridWeek next week. But would it be about stimulus funds? Or something else? What else could it be? Standards? There was a lot of excitement—and tension—at Autovation surrounding that announcement.
It also sounds like 2010 will be the year of the consumer—whether the consumer knows it or not. This conference was certainly abuzz with ways to help better engage and serve energy consumers. But a key question that came across was: if we engage consumers in their energy consumption, how much do they really need to be involved? I saw technologies ranging from very interactive web displays that could consume hours of your time tracking the consumption of each and every appliance in your home to an application that could essentially tell utilities how many kids you have, whether you have a pool pump, what appliances you use and when (and probably what color of socks you wear each day), just by applying some algorithms to interval meter data. Essentially, it comes down to what level of interaction will be right for energy consumers to effectively manage their energy consumption. And what solutions will be right for which customers. As one consultant pointed out, energy won’t be monolithic anymore. Marketing people will likely have a field day targeting different consumers with the most appropriate energy solutions for their individual lifestyles.
My last key takeaway was talking toasters. You know you have been to a few too many conferences when you review your notes and realize that the main note you wrote down about a conference session was “talking toasters.” But it was interesting concept. The concept was really to think about how the smart grid and intelligent utility will connect so many different components that have never interacted before. All the way from toasters to turbines. Even though the talking toasters point was brought up in jest, it helped remind me that even as the smart grid plows ahead—and it seems like people are finally starting to come to an agreement on what it means—someone brings another idea to the table, another wrinkle, which may turn from idea to innovation and change the whole smart grid game. Perhaps it won’t get to the point where you can control nuclear power plants with your toaster (although it could be handy because bread never seems to become toast fast enough), but as smart grid and intelligent utility technologies roll out, we will using them and leveraging the information from them in ways we have yet to imagine. Okay, enough for now, but keep an eye out for Airport Reports for SAP for Utilities and GridWeek coming soon.
Thanks for reading!
H.
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