Smart Grid Week 2010 got started at the CU Law School on November 17th with a day of roundtable discussions, presentations, and academic workshops hosted by the Center for European Law and Economics (CELEC) along with several other partners including the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, the Center for Energy and Environment Security (CEES), Wilkinson Barker Knauer LLP (WBK, LLP), and TalkStandards.com.
The event began with opening comments from Mattias Ganslandt of CELEC and was followed by a roundtable discussion on transforming electricity markets through innovation and deployment, moderated by Ray Gifford of WBK, LLP. Over lunch attendants enjoyed a keynote presentation by Steve Hauser of the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) and in the afternoon everyone participated in two academic workshops with the first panel focusing on supply-side issues and the second reviewing issues of demand.
In his opening remarks on the roundtable discussion, Ray Gifford observed that while the last couple of years since the Obama administration took office seem to have been a period of smart grid hype, we now appear to be entering the era of smart grid disillusionment, with the corresponding explosion in conferences on the topic that tends to follow. In this “era of conferences,” there are three main areas of focus for discussion: technological, business and regulatory. Addressing these issues were Ajit Jaokar from FutureText, John Loporto from Power Tagging, Roy Perry from CableLabs, and Tim Enwall from Tendril.
While Ajit observed that Europe is behind the US in smart grid overall, John clarified to specify that the US is still struggling to deal with important regulatory issues related to incentives for power utilities, remarking that “asking utilities to sell less power is like approaching Oscar-meyer and telling them to stop selling so many hotdogs so that people have fewer heart attacks.” John also supported regulations discouraging stake-holders from over-doing smart grid innovation, as “laying fiber optic cable all along the distribution lines is like using a Ferrari when a wheelbarrow would have done the trick.”
Next, the discussion turned to the example of Boulder as a smart grid city and the pending case with Excel, with a lively debate ensuing between lawyers from each side both named Bill. The city attorney observed that although Excel had done an excellent job of marketing the Boulder smart grid project globally, especially in Europe, consumers in the US appear to have a much more skeptical view of smart grid. Another important difference between the US and Europe is the level of concern over privacy, which is considered much more important in Europe.
Tim Enwall of Tendril pointed out that creating marketplace structures in the smart grid to encourage efficiency will be increasingly important as the load is impacted by electric cars in particular, which could be like adding two more air conditioning loads at peak when everyone comes home and plugs in. The real challenge is market structure differences across states, affecting which business models are allowed where. Although everyone in the utility industry sees real benefits from smart grid, we still have a regulatory problem where most utilities are recovering their costs by selling a certain number of electrons. In a recession, when they already have more electrons than they need, they will not respond to incentives for selling fewer of them. Inevitably, the price cap issue was raised as a potential solution.
Executive summary continued for the lunch (keynote) and afternoon (academic) sessions
