At GreenBeat 2009's Politics and Policy session, the prevalent theme was the need for a simple, efficient legislation and regulation package for the U.S. power system.
Robert Gee of Gee Strategies went so far as to say, "Before anything is passed into law we need to get it past a panel of sixth graders, see if they can understand it. That is how simple we need to be going here."
Unfortunately, Rick Counihan of Enernoc thinks the Red Sox will have more pennants than the New York Yankees before this happens. Pessimism aside, the legislation just isn't there for the infrastructure changes that are starting to take place. If the power grids in this country are unified, there will be some availability and pricing problems to work out. We just can't price Southeast nuclear power and Arizona Solar the same way, says Gee.
Counihan made the argument that non-financial benefits aren't being discussed at the regulatory level.
"People forget, the smart grid is going to improve your life," he said. "There are lots of convenience factors being totally ignored and people are focused on residential use but commercial and industrial sectors are 2/3 of consumption." He went on to say "NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) has been a great help with their standardized protocols" and wonders whether cost recovery could be a part of the changeover, so that companies won't wait until the last minute to upgrade to smarter utilities distribution.
Katherine Hamilton, president of the GridWise Alliance, was interested in the job improvement angle, citing a company that retrained their line workers instead of creating a bunch of temporary new jobs. Later, Hamilton said that in her view, transparency in metering is a civil rights issue and she equated the ability to make choices regarding energy to the right to decide how you use your cell phone.
"Most people don't think they have choices but need to realize that they do -- and the smart grid is key to this change in mentality," she said.
Aside from NIST's efforts, what Hamilton wants more than anything from the government (related to smart grid, anyway) is a single set of standards and legislation.
"Utilities can't plan ahead without knowing their regulatory environment," she said.
According to Lesh, we need legislation in place with regard to disconnection of power, brownout rights, timing of notices -- a host of issues. We don't know what all of this is going to look like when we have this great new set of capabilities, she says, and "you'd like to time it so that we don't have a gap between these capabilities and the rules."
Pamela Lesh of Graceful Systems calls decoupling (of revenues and power supplied) "stopping the car -- it isn't turning around yet." When Lesh talks about the need for public process and legislation, it seems to be physically hurting her.
Seeming to have a gift for simplification, Gee summed it up: "Utilities companies need to step it up and realize what goes on with this legislation. It can be kind of petty and if you aren't well versed in the thing, it can seem pretty unapproachable."
Uh-huh.