Bob Gilligan, vice president, transmission and distribution, GE Energy
Are you dealing with Masdar on this topic?
We are cooperating in the Masdar project and we hope to do more there. We are involved in city scale deployments of smart grids including embedded generation, so solar generation and including plug in stations and how that needs to interact with the utility.
Does the smart grid concept constitute an invasion of privacy, with so much information being passed from consumers to utilities?
I know that that is a concern amongst some people, but there is nothing about the smart grid which says the utility has the right to any data beyond your total energy use. Its really up to the regulators to set the guidelines, what information is provided to the consumer and what incremental information is provided back to the utility. I think that this could be a system where consumers elect to share their use information so their utilities can provide them broader services or they can elect not to do that which would limit the services the utilities provide.
What are the challenges facing the deployment of this technology?
There is not a big technology challenge. I think we have technology that can address the needs of a smarter grid. The challenge is going to the policy and the regulatory frameworks, getting the right incentives around efficiency, ensuring that it pays to reduce losses. Getting the right incentives around renewable and ensuring that we are encouraged to have greener energy sources is another challenge.
Utilities by providing information to consumers can help them reduce their energy use. But that doesn’t benefit the utilities, you are reducing the demand for their product. So you need to have the right policy and regulatory framework.
It’s critical. We as consumers have a very shallow relationship with our utilities. We get a bill at the end of each month which tells us how much we used and how much we owe. Most of us don’t know what a kw/h is but that’s the language that utilities use. So we have a lot to learn about how we talk to consumers, how we get them to be excited about the idea of reducing their energy use, how we gt them to understand that there are opportunities to use different energy sources. That is a lot that we can do to begin preparing consumers for this greener future.
Younger consumers are very interested and they are so more environmentally in touch than the older generation. I think there is a lot we can do with kids and with young adults, and they will become catalysts for consumers to more generally become interested.
What are your hopes for the future?
I want to see more smart city deployments where we have holistic deployments of smart grid technology on a scale which is meaningful so that we can demonstrate the benefits that we can reduce the losses and we can support more distributed generation and do it in a sustainable way and we can improve reliability and enable consumers to change their energy use habits.
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