What's the smart grid buzz in 2011?
Behind-the-scenes discussions yield fruitful harvest
Kate Rowland | Feb 08, 2011

I did a lot of listening last week.
One of the most-asked questions at any industry conference, participant to participant, is "what are you hearing?" DistribuTECH was no different. The answers this time, though, were far more disparate than two years ago, at the same conference, in the same venue, when the answers were clearly "stimulus funding" and "smart meters/AMI."
Here's a peek at some of this year's most-discussed topics.
Consumers
There were definite discussions centering on consumers, selling to consumers and consumer pushback. From Craig Boice, president of Boice Dunham Group, who spoke at the pre-conference Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative Symposium, came the following opening salvo. "If we look to other industries, they are all working to create customer demand," he said. "We have to come up with compelling enough products and a compelling story to create customer demand."
Terri Flora, director of corporate communications for AEP Ohio, echoed Boice, and clearly defined the challenge electric utilities are facing. "We can't think like a utility; we have to think like a Best Buy. And that's very difficult for us," she said.
This is an enormous challenge utilities have identified for themselves in the coming year, according to a new Comverge survey of utilities released during DistribuTECH. While aging infrastructure and implementing variable and dynamic pricing programs were also identified, consumer education and awareness was identified by more than 50 percent of survey participants as a consumer barrier, ranking ahead of perceived price increases and security concerns.
Technology vs. people process: getting all of it right
Communicating successfully within and across the organization is also important. "While the technology side is