A smart grid is a transactive grid.
- Lynne Kiesling
Archive for March, 2011

Market Failure? Cutting The Signal On Wireless Smart Meters In California

Via The San Francisco Chronicle, an interesting report on PG&E’s long-awaited SmartMeter opt-out plan designed to help quell growing protests over the new electricity and gas meters which PG&E is installing throughout Northern and Central California.  Wouldn’t it have been easier (dare I say, smarter) to motivate consumers with a compelling (smart) market reason to […]

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Should Utilities Profit From Smart Meter Deployments?

Via SmartMeters.com, a report encouraging utilities to investigate alternative revenue generation opportunities from their smart meter infrastructure.  While enthusiastic proponents of innovation and markets, we are sanguine to this article’s premise.  First, we believe smart markets primarily engage, reward, and motivate consumers – not utilities.  Second, we encourage the development of alternative revenue streams, but […]

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Utility Consumers: Voting With Their Lightbulbs

Courtesy of The Energy Collective, an interesting article on the role of consumers in smart grid deployments and the impact that artificial price signals and bill complexity have resulted in little efficiency improvements.  While we are sanguine about the report’s suggested solution – distributed energy storage – we would much rather have smart markets, using […]

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About This Blog And Its Authors
Grid Unlocked is powered by two eco-preneurs who analyze and reference articles, reports, and interviews that can help unlock the nascent, complex and expanding linkages between smart meters, smart grids, and above all: smart markets.

Based on decades of experience and interest in conservation, Monty Simus believes that a truly “smart” grid must be a “transactive” grid, unshackled from its current status as a so-called “natural monopoly.”

In short, an unlocked grid must adopt and harness the power of markets to incentivize individual users, linked to each other on a large scale, who change consumptive behavior in creative ways that drive efficiency and bring equity to use of the planet's finite and increasingly scarce resources.