Tag Archives: Electricity

Nest and technology-service bundling

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Lynne Kiesling

nest-rush-hour-alert

Nest’s recent business developments are refreshing and promising. Building on the popularity of its elegant and easy-to-use learning thermostat in its first couple of years, Nest is introducing new Nest-enabled services to automate changes in settings and energy use in the home. Called Rush Hour Rewards and Seasonal Savings, Nest claims:

Rush Hour Rewards could help you earn anywhere from $20-$60 this summer—it takes advantage of energy company incentives that pay you to use less energy when everyone else is using more. Seasonal Savings takes everything Nest has learned about you and automatically fine-tunes Nest’s schedule to save energy, without sacrificing comfort. Field trials have been impressive: Nest owners have used 5-10% less heating and cooling with Seasonal Savings and 80% said they’d keep their tuned-up schedules after Seasonal Savings ended.

The ever-incisive Katie Fehrenbacher calls their move a bundling of its “smart thermostat with data-driven services“, which sounds about right to me.

Behind these new services is the cloud-based big data algorithms that are the secret sauce of Nest, and which Nest has now named Auto-Tune. Now that Nest has gotten hundreds of thousands of thermostats out there in the market, and has done two years of field trials, it has been able to collect a large amount of data about how customers use and react to temperature and cooling changes. Nest uses this data about behavioral changes to inform its services and how its algorithms work.

She also remarks on something I noticed — in its marketing of its new services Nest assiduously avoids the phrase “demand response”, instead saying “New features save energy & make money. Automatically.” Once you get beyond the elegant interface, the thoughtful network and device connectivity, and the “secret sauce” algorithms, Rush Hour Rewards is little more than standard, administered, regulator-approved direct load control. But Nest’s elegance, marketing, and social-media-savvy outreach may make it more widespread and appealing than any number of regulator-approved bill inserts about AC cyling have over the decades.

In a very good Wired story on Nest Energy Services, Steven Levy analogizes between the technology-digital service bundle in energy and in music; quoting Nest CEO Tony Faddell, Levy notes that:

This pivot is in the best tradition of companies like Apple and even Amazon, whose hardware devices have evolved to become front ends for services like iTunes or Amazon Prime Instant Movies. Explaining how this model works in the thermostat world, Fadell compares power utilities to record labels. Just as Apple provided services to help customers link with the labels to get music, Nest is building digital services to help customers save money. Unlike the case with record labels, however, Nest isn’t eroding the utility business model, but fulfilling a long-term need–getting customers to change their behavior during periods of energy scarcity.

“Until now, if utilities wanted customers to change their behavior to use less electricity at those time, they instituted what was called unilateral demand response—they wouldn’t automate the process, they’d turn off the air-conditioning whenever they wanted. It was like DRM during the iPod days—where companies like Sony said, ‘I am the guardian, and I’m going to tell you what to do’.”

Faddell (and Levy and Fehrenbacher) articulates the value potential of technology-service bundles to automate energy consumption decisions in ways that save energy and money without reducing comfort. While the guts of their services are still direct load control and are not dynamic in any way that would make meaningful use of such a potentially transactive technology, I do think it’s a promising evolution beyond the monolithic, administrative, regulatory demand response approach.

Ford’s MyEnergi Lifestyle

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Lynne Kiesling

You may know that the annual Consumer Electronics Show has been going on this week in Las Vegas (CES2013). CES is the venue for displaying the latest, greatest, wonderful electronic gadgets that will enrich your life, improve your productivity, reduce your stress, and make your breath minty fresh.

And, increasingly, ways to save energy and reduce energy waste. The most ambitious proposition to come out of CES2013 is Ford’s MyEnergi Lifestyle, as described in a Wired magazine article from the show:

Here at CES 2013, the automaker announced MyEnergi Lifestyle, a sweeping collaboration with appliance giant Whirlpool, smart-meter supplier Infineon, Internet-connected thermostat company Nest Labs and, for a green-energy slant, solar-tech provider SunPower. The goal is to help people understand how the “time-flexible” EV charging model can more cheaply power home appliances, and how combining an EV, connected appliances and the data they generate can help them better manage their energy consumption and avoid paying for power at high rates. …

Appliances are getting smarter, too. Some of the most power-hungry appliances, such as a water heater and the ice maker in your freezer, can now schedule their most energy-intensive activities at night. Nest’s Internet-connected thermostat can help homeowners save energy while their [sic] away. While some of the appliances and devices within MyEnergi Lifestyle launch early this year, others are available now, Tinskey said.

One reason why I think this initiative is promising is its involvement of Whirlpool and Nest, two very different companies that are both focused on ways to combine digital technology and elegant design to make energy efficiency in the home appealing, attractive, and easy to implement.

The value proposition is largely a cloud-based data one — gather data on the electricity use in the home in real time, program in some consumer-focused triggers, such as price thresholds, and manage the electricity use in the home with the objective of minimizing cost and emissions. Gee, I think I’ve heard that one here before …

Regulation’s effects on innovation in energy technologies: the experimentation connection

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Lynne Kiesling

Remember the first time you bought a mobile phone (which in my case was 1995). You may have been happy with your land line phone, but this new mobile phone thing looks like it would be really handy in an emergency, so you-in-1995 said sure, I’ll get a cell phone, but not really use it that much. Then, the technology improved, and more of your friends and family got phones, so you used it more. Then you saw others with cool flip phones, in colors, and you did some searching to see if other phones had features you might like. Then came text messaging, and you experimented with learning a new shorthand language (or, if you’re like me, you stayed a pedant about spelling even in text messages that you had to tap out on number pad keys). You adopted text messaging, or not. Then came the touch screen, largely via the disruptive iPhone, and the cluster of smartphone innovation was upon us.  Maybe you have a smartphone, maybe you don’t; maybe your smartphone is an iPhone, maybe it isn’t. But since 1995, your choice of communication technology, and the set from which you can choose, has changed dramatically.

This change didn’t happen overnight, and for most people was not a discrete move from old choice to new choice, A to B, without any other choices along the way. Similarly for technological change and the production of goods and services. For both consumers and producers, our choices in markets are the consequence of a process of experimentation, trial and error, and learning. Indeed, whether your perspective on dynamic competition is based on Schumpeter or Hayek or Kirzner (or all of the above), the fundamental essence of competition in market processes is that it’s a process of experimentation, trial and error, and learning, on the part of both producers and consumers. That’s how we get new products and services, that’s how we signal to producers whether their innovations are valuable to us as consumers, that’s how innovation creates economic growth and vibrancy, through the application of our creativity and our taste for creating and experiencing novelty.

This kind of dynamism is common in our world, and is increasingly an aspect of our lives that creates value for us; mobile telephony is the most obvious example, but even in products as mundane as milk, the fundamental aspect of the market process is this experimentation, trial and error, and learning. How else would Organic Valley have started coming out with a line of milk that is entirely from pasture-raised cows? (I am happily consuming this milk; pasture-raised cows make milk with more essential fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid, very important for health)

But this kind of dynamism, while common, is not pervasive. Institutions matter, and in particular, various forms of government regulation can influence the extent to which such technological dynamism occurs in a market. The example I have in mind as a counterpoint, the example I want to explain and understand, is consumer-facing electricity technologies, like thermostats and home energy management systems. For the past several years there has been considerable innovation in this space, due to the application and extension of digital communication technology innovations. But despite the frequent claims over the past few years that this year will be the year of the consumer energy technology, it keeps not happening.

Tomorrow in New Orleans, at the Southern Economic Association meetings, I’ll be presenting a paper that grapples with this question. My argument is that traditional economic regulation of the electricity industry slows or stifles innovation because regulation undercuts the experimentation, trial and error, and learning of both producers and consumers. As I state in the abstract:

Persistent regulation in potentially competitive markets can undermine consumer benefits when technological change both makes those markets competitive and creates new opportunities for market experimentation. This paper applies the Bell Doctrine precedent of “quarantine the monopoly” to the electricity industry, and extends the Bell Doctrine by analyzing the role of market experimentation in generating the benefits of competition. The general failure to quarantine the monopoly wires segment and its regulated monopolist from the potentially competitive downstream retail market contributes to the slow pace and lackluster performance of retail electricity markets for residential customers. The form of this failure to quarantine the monopoly is the persistence of an incumbent default service contract that was intended to be a transition mechanism to full retail competition, coupled with the regulatory definition of product characteristics and market boundaries that is necessary to define the default product and evaluate the regulated monopolist’s performance in providing it. The consequence of the incumbent’s incomplete exit from the retail market suggests that as regulated monopolists and regulators evaluate customer-facing smart grid investments, regulators and other policymakers should consider the potential anti-competitive effects of the failure to quarantine the monopoly with respect to the default service contract and in-home energy management technology.

In August 2011 I wrote about the Bell Doctrine, Baxter’s precedent from the U.S. v. AT&T divestiture case, and how we have failed to quarantine the monopoly in electricity. This paper is an extension of that argument, and I welcome comments!

If you’ll be at the SEA meetings, I hope to see you there; I am headed to NOLA tonight, and look forward to a fun weekend full of good economic brain candy.

Just how “wasteful” are data centers?

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Lynne Kiesling

You may have seen the article in Sunday’s New York Times on how “wasteful” data centers are — they use large amounts of electricity to enable the level of redundancy required to achieve the degree of reliability and uptime that consumers expect from their Internet activities. I put the word “waste” in quotes because I think Don Boudreaux has a point, in his letter to the editor in response to the article: where’s the line between “waste” and “use”? The NYT article presents data center power use as wasteful, implying that the author thinks that they should either figure out ways to deliver the same reliability with less electricity, or that we consumers should change our preferences so we don’t place as much value on reliability. I’ll argue later that data center operators have high-powered incentives to do the former, and as for the latter, I invite the NYT author to imagine how he thinks NYT readers would respond to a slowdown or lack of server availability that made it hard for them to access NYT articles.

Of course the undercurrent here is the argument that the price of our Internet activity does not include the environmental cost associated with power use, and consequently we should use public policy to impose a price on data centers, or on Internet use, to reflect that cost. The article isn’t explicit about carbon policy, but that’s the implication.

My initial reaction to the article was that it was biased and somewhat inaccurate, and that it overlooked a wide array of innovations that chip manufacturers, data center operators, and architects have created over the past few years to reduce power use per calculation as well as overall power use. Fortunately, Katie Fehrenbacher (who is more knowledgeable than I in these matters) had a similar reaction, and wrote up her assessment:

As my headline suggests they sound like the author, who spent over a year reporting out the series, jumped into a time machine and did his reporting a couple years ago. One of the reasons is that both articles so far start with anecdotes from 2006 about Microsoft and Facebook. The data centers that Facebook recently built in Forest City, North Carolina and Prineville, Oregon, are industry pioneers in terms of energy efficiency and openness. Microsoft, too, has more recently pledged to get rid of its diesel generators for its facilities, and has been using less air conditioning in its new data centers.

The data center operators at the largest Internet companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and eBay are so focused on energy efficiency of their newest data centers that new designs are starting to be widely adopted with technologies like open air cooling (getting rid of the huge air conditioning units in these things). New types of low power chips and servers are being developed by startups like SeaMicro, which was recently bought by AMD. The articles so far don’t mention these innovations.

She does, though, think that there’s value in the NYT series because it will shine some light on data center operators who aren’t thinking about energy efficiency and power use. She wrote a 4-part series on data center power use, which I recommend and to which she links in her article.

From a policy perspective, is there an “externality” here to be addressed? Data centers are expensive and take up a lot of space, and if you are incurring the cost of a data center, electricity is your top expense item. Thus firms have strong incentives to minimize those costs while still delivering the services and degree of reliability that they have promised to their customers. That’s a high-powered incentive to pursue energy efficiency innovations with a policy intervention, and that incentive has been inducing those innovations over the past 5 years, as Fehrenbacher notes in her article and her data center series. Companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook have been driving those innovations, are in aggregate the largest data center operators, and thus are driving the majority of data center server traffic in a more energy-efficient direction. As is typical with innovation and new technology adoption, others will follow as the innovations are refined and made easier to implement.

Another important innovation that has implications for energy efficiency, but has the Bastiat-esque problem of being unseen, is the dramatic move toward server virtualization in data centers. With server virtualization, data center operators can essentially run several virtual servers off of one physical server. Obviously this increases the computing and storage capacity of the data center without increasing the physical assets, and on balance this means an increase in computing and storage capacity without an appreciable change in power use — more computing per watt of power consumed. In the absence of virtualization, to achieve that same capacity would have required a dramatic increase in physical server capacity, and in electricity use to power those servers. Neither the NYT article nor Fehrenbacher’s series address the role that virtualization has played in enabling capacity optimization and high reliability at lower power use levels. Here’s a concise Green Grid white paper on the subject.

Yes, there is some energy wasted in data center operations, just as there is in every single way that we use energy — we won’t be repealing the laws of thermodynamics any time soon. But data center operators have economic incentives to pursue energy efficiency, and a wide array of inventors, architects, and other entrepreneurs see opportunities in those incentives. We are seeing this process play out before our eyes.

Enron and crony corporatism

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Lynne Kiesling

Rob Bradley has an Econlib essay on Enron, and it’s a good one. He focuses on Enron’s particular form of crony corporatism, its ability to take advantage of regulatory complexity, and the lessons that we should carry forward from the experience:

Enron was essentially a political company, not a free-market one. Ken Lay’s creation would be unknown to history were it not for the distorted incentives from the government side of the mixed economy.

For classical liberals, Enron is a case study in support of the separation of government and business. There is egregious rent-seeking, whereby the company worked to shape political intervention for economic advantage. There is bootleggers and Baptist politicking, whereby Enron teamed with nonprofit groups to win support for what was in the company’s narrow self-interest.

There is the peril of half-slave, half-free. Partially deregulated markets (such as with electricity in California) created a devil’s sand box for profit-making that otherwise would have been absent in a free-market order.

A proposal for Fisk power plant: museum of history and industry

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Lynne Kiesling

After a long and contentious series of battles over the past three decades, two of the original coal-fired steam turbine power plants in Chicago powered down at the end of August. The Fisk plant and the Crawford plant were the last two coal-fired power plants in operation within a major U.S. city, and they closed due to a combination of the economics of natural gas relative to coal and the potency of neighborhood opposition to having large power plants situated in Pilsen (Fisk) and Little Village (Crawford), which are densely-populated neighborhoods in Chicago.

These two power plants are important landmarks in our economic history, industrial history, regional history, and entrepreneurship. Fisk, in particular, opened in 1903, and was a bold, innovative, and controversial investment decision on the part of Samuel Insull:

The day the Fisk plant began operating — Oct. 2, 1903, only a decade after electricity debuted at Chicago’s World’s Fair — some feared it might explode, including its financier, Samuel Insull, according to a “A Spirit Capable,” a history of Commonwealth Edison Co.

“If it blows up, I will blow up with it,” Insull reportedly said, apparently figuring that if the plant’s massive boiler blew up, his career was finished anyway. Insull was the forefather of what would become Commonwealth Edison.

Fisk, in what became the Pilsen neighborhood, was a significant step forward because it marked the first time electricity became available on a large scale in Chicago. Until then dynamos supplied electricity to Chicago’s Loop and a few wealthy neighborhoods, but most homes were still lighted by gas.

Within three years, what would later become Commonwealth Edison, was supplying 50,000 customers with electricity and double that number by 1909. Four years later that number again doubled. The Crawford plant, built only five miles from Fisk, came online in 1924. Between 1919 and 1929 the utility grew to supply nearly 1 million customers.

Fisk was considered so advanced that during a January 1921 trip to America, Queen Mary and King George V of England popped in to see it and signed their names in a huge visitors’ book. In 1912 visitor Thomas Edison had signed the same book, listing his profession as “inventor.” Fisk and Crawford’s turbines have since been replaced and upgraded many times over.

Rob Bradley also discusses Insull’s decision-making process regarding Fisk in his Edison to Enron, which I reviewed here recently. As the Smithsonian Institution notes, Insull had to work very hard to persuade General Electric to manufacture the 5-megawatt steam turbine for Fisk in 1902, when GE’s standard turbine size was 3MW. This is the Smithsonian’s picture of Fisk’s turbine in 1907:

Consider the economic impact of that bold investment — lighting and other electric services for residential customers who had heretofore relied on gas lighting, more reliable electricity at a larger scale for more industrial and commercial customers to run machines and shops, and the ability to serve more and more customers at increasingly lower average cost due to the dramatic economies of scale that the technology created. The Fisk station pioneered changes that truly transformed the daily lives and the economic well-being of Chicagoans, and then millions of people around the world. Electricity made Chicago prosper.

As Mayor Emanuel and others consider proposals for brownfield renovation of these areas and adjacent ones, think about how the power, the ingeneuity, the drive, the entrepreneurship of which the Fisk Street Station was emblematic have changed the world — mostly for the (dramatically) better, but also with the unintended by-products of pollution. Think about the history of industry and commerce in Chicago, and the role that Fisk Street Station played in making it possible. Think about places like the Tate Modern in London, situated in a decommissioned architecturally significant power plant on the Thames.

The Fisk Street Station could be a museum of history and industry. Perhaps a joint venture between the Museum of Science and Industry and the Chicago History Museum. The Galvin Center for Electricity Innovation at the Illinois Institute of Technology could provide exhibits on electricity technology innovation and sustainability. The Clean Energy Trust could showcase clean energy innovations. The museum could be a focal point for the local electricity, energy, and environmental community to develop and share new knowledge. And we could explore all of this innovation in the context of the very real and very important history of electricity in Chicago.

Even if the original 1903 structure can’t be salvaged or if the original 5MW turbine no longer exists, this site is an opportunity to celebrate and explore the benefits and tradeoffs of our industrial history, warts and all. Having such a museum in Pilsen would increase visitor activity, contributing to the neighborhood economy and our broader education with respect to electricity and our economic history.

The LIFX lightbulb: Bringing the Internet of things to electricity

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Lynne Kiesling

The LIFX lightbulb is one of the most exciting things I’ve seen in a while, even in a period of substantial innovation affecting many areas of our lives. It’s a Kickstarter project, not coming from an established company like GE or Philips, not coming from within the electricity industry. Go watch the intro video, and then come back … you back? So how cool is that? Wifi enabled for automation and remote control from your smartphone. Automation of electricity consumption at the bulb level. You can set your nightstand bulb to dim and brighten according to your sleep cycle. It’s an LED bulb, so it can change colors, any combination in the Pantone scale, from your phone, anywhere. And, as an LED bulb, you get all of these automation and aesthetic features in a low-energy, low-carbon package.

This discussion of their project provides insight into the entrepreneurial future of consumer-facing energy technology — it’s not about the hardware, it’s about the software:

The LIFX app is one of our favorite aspects of the entire project, and we’ve spent countless hours thinking about how you can interact with your lights. We have mapped out a very smooth configuration UX from the app to the LIFX master bulb. In essence you place your LIFX smartbulb into a light socket, turn the switch on and then launch the app. You will be guided through a process of choosing your home network from a list and then entering your password. The LIFX master bulb will then auto configure itself to your router and all the slave bulbs will auto connect to the master. If you add more slave bulbs down the track  these will also auto connect.

Regarding security: LIFX will be as secure as your WiFi network. eg. without the WiFi network password you can’t control the smartbulbs.

We’re aware that while the hardware is the most visible and interesting part of this project our software is the soul.

This. This is the right thing to do, from my perspective, from both economic and environmental perspectives. And while I think Kevin Tofel at Greentech is right that there’s a network architecture issue here (separate control systems vs. a single server capturing and implementing your automation decisions throughout the house), a system like LIFX’s seems to me to be flexible enough to be incorporated into a whole-house energy management setup. And, given how enthusiastically consumers have adopted wireless mobile technologies, that seems to be a good place to start to get consumers comfortable with this degree of automation and functionality. Transactive capabilities and dynamic pricing are next! Unless our electricity network is transactive it’s not smart, and intelligent end-use devices (and the connectivity to network them for automation) create value for consumers from that intelligence.

Note also the implications of software like LIFX’s for having electricity enter the Internet of Things. As sensors and the connectivity among them become ubiquitous, we can automate our consumption decisions much more deeply, at a much more granular level (down to the bulb, here), in ways that do not inconvenience us. We can use the technology to make ourselves better off by automating our choices in response to variables we care about, which eventually will include variables like the retail price of electricity and the carbon content of the fuel used to generate it. The Internet of Things reflects Alfred North Whitehead’s observation that “civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”

The Internet of Things enables mass customization and the ability of each individual to choose a bundle, a set of features, a price contract that they expect to bring them the most net benefits. This is a dramatic technological and cultural break from the century-long custom and regulatory practice of uniform products, uniform quality, uniform pricing as a matter of social policy. The public interest ethic of uniformity ties us to mediocrity, to the extent that it constrains what features and pricing people can bundle and consume with technologies like these.

Another Internet of Things implication here is that, with each bulb having a unique sensor and identifier, we will generate very detailed, granular data about how the connected, sensing devices operate. Such “big data” can help us use less energy, save money, do more with less, and lots of other things I can’t imagine but some other entrepreneur will, and will bring to market, if regulation doesn’t stifle it, and with clear stipulations of consumer privacy and property rights in their data.

You can also tell that this is an interesting topic when I am not the first economist to write about it! I love seeing my colleagues interested in electricity-related technologies. Mark Perry shares my enthusiasm about the application of human creativity to generate such a product. Josh Gans shares my enthusiasm for the networking, the interoperability, and the open architecture. And Felix Salmon offers a worthy note of caution about the ability of LIFX to deliver on its promised features and timeline, given the time delays experienced in other Kickstarter projects.

A fashion coda on wireless charging

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Lynne Kiesling

As a coda to my previous post on wireless induction charging, there’s a Kickstarter out right now for Everpurse, a wireless charging purse for iPhone 4. The battery pack in the purse has to be charged from an AC adapter, but it will charge a phone as long as it has charge.

Is wireless charging finally going to take off?

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Lynne Kiesling

Since the pioneering research of Nikola Tesla (have you contributed to his museum yet?) we’ve dreamed of wireless transmission of electricity, including wireless charging of devices. Tesla’s magnetic induction experiments gave us proof of concept almost 140 years ago, so where are the wireless chargers? We were promised wireless charging!

Jessical Leber at Technology Review suggests that it’s not a lack of supply, but rather slow consumer adoption that’s the reason why we don’t have ubiquitous wireless charging.

Why hasn’t cord-free charging—where a device gets charged when you place it on a charging surface—caught on? It’s not due to a shortage of products, nor from a shortage of companies that want to sell them. More than 125 businesses have joined the Wireless Power Consortium, formed in late 2008 to create a global charging standard. While the consortium hopes the technology will one day become as common as Bluetooth in most devices and, like Wi-Fi, available in many public spaces, wireless charging has been slow to take off.

I think a common, open standard, like we have for Bluetooth and USB, will reduce adoption hurdles, although she does discuss toward the end of the article the current set of two competing standards. History tells us, though, from rail gauges to DVD formats, convergence eventually occurs.

This article is full of valuable and interesting information about the technical hurdles of getting induction receivers in devices, investing in charging mats for public places, and so on, but it’s frustratingly oblique in its answer to the question in the quote above. Leber doesn’t offer any specific answers to the question of why consumers have been slow to adopt wireless charging, although she implies two reasons: non-binding power requirement constraints and the coordination-complementarity bottleneck between devices and charging pads. As more consumers bump up against the constraints of battery capacity, wireless charging will become more attractive. The article also mentions the potential inclusion of charging mats in cars, and the investment involvement of automobile manufacturers in wireless charging companies.

Note here the interaction of three different innovation processes — device, battery, and charging pad. Devices are becoming more functional, requiring more power, draining batteries faster. Batteries have become more robust and longer-lived, but have been outpaced by the power demands of the increased functionality of mobile devices. Layer that on top of the innovation process in charging pads and you have quite a moving target, technologically and economically.

Quotation of the day … from Keynes

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Lynne Kiesling

I am attending an electricity markets workshop that we are holding here at Northwestern, about which I’ll have more to say later, but for now I wanted to capture a quotation of the day (apologies to Don Boudreaux for using his meme):

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

-John Maynard Keynes (1936)

Hung-po Chao from ISO New England used this quote in his talk, with reference to what I think of as the crucial need to clear the overgrowth in the regulatory underbrush, and the perverse incentives that underbrush creates (and the special interests that perpetuate it).