If you follow the GridWise Architecture Council and Olympic Peninsula project links that I provided in the first post, you will see that I work with a team of engineers and IT folks, and we all have a lot of experience in various parts of grid architecture.

I am also looking forward to electricity prices jumping up to $1,000,000 per kilowatt next time we have some sort of a crisis/disaster. Instead of rushing to the grocery store to get canned food, we’ll all go home and recharge our batteries.

The gazillion dollar question on my mind is: What is the benefit of all this? Are our household electricity costs too high? So once this smart stuff is there, I should expect to pay at most like $5 per month for electricity, right? Because if I’m still gonna pay the same $50, I am voting NO for the smart grid.

I’m not suggesting technological development isn’t important – just that it isn’t necessary as an area of focus, in the sense that with regulatory reform, markets will pull technologies forward. (They’ll still be developed, to be sure, it’s just that they will come from a pull rather than a push strategy.) But absent market reform, tech development is a waste of time. All the smart meters in the world won’t give regulated utilities an economic interest in energy conservation, and all the high-frequency data encryption in A/C power flows won’t do anything to affect the liquidity of merchant power markets. I’m not suggesting we don’t need a cart and a horse – simply that we don’t confuse the sequence of the two.

I’m doing this again to correct a typographic problem. Em-dashes I inserted in the above comment were interpreted by the comment application HTML as hyphens — which made the text hard to read. Hope this is better.

The technology side is important because it is low-cost and ubiquitous technology -– embedded human “knowledge” in capital — that enables humans within the socialsphere to easily take advantage of the exchange market Lynne is speaking of. Of course, political and regulatory reform are also absolutely vital. The absence of a “rules-of-the-game” environment in which the technology may be utilized will inevitably gum up the works and impede market transactions. So I see it as more of a BOTH/AND situation and not an EITHER/OR. Both technology and regulatory reform are essential.

The technology side is important because it is low-cost and ubiquitous technology–embedded human “knowledge” in capital–that enables humans within the socialsphere to easily take advantage of the exchange market Lynne is speaking of. Of course, political and regulatory reform are also absolutely vital. The absence of a “rules-of-the-game” environment in which the technology may be utilized will inevitably gum up the works and impede market transactions. So I see it as more of a BOTH/AND situation and not an EITHER/OR. Both technology and regulatory reform are essential.