A smart grid is a transactive grid.
- Lynne Kiesling
Water-Trading Has Deep and Ancient Roots

Via The Wall Street Journal, commentary on how – for centuries – transparent water exchanges have built resilience across diverse cultures: “Water-Trading Market Runs Into Trouble” (Business News, Sept. 4) sheds overdue light on the abject mess Down Under. However, cap-and-trade water markets are neither strange nor new. For centuries, transparent water exchanges—Oman’s aflaj, Morocco’s […]

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A Liquid Market

Courtesy of The Economist, a look at the potential for market to place a role in allocating and conserving scarce water supplies: A long stretch of highway running between Los Angeles and San Francisco separates the dry hills to the west from the green plains of the San Joaquin Valley to the east, where much […]

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Blockchain: The Era Of The Energy Internet

Via Engineers Australia, an interesting brief for an upcoming presentation on how generation and blockchain are transforming legacy power networks into community owned economic engines: Innovations from the sharing economy are now entering utilities, from which end users play a more active role in both production and consumption of electricity and where the marginal cost of […]

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Using Water Markets To Combat Drought

Via Tuscon.com, commentary on the use of water markets to encourage farmers to slightly reduce their consumption in exchange for financial help from municipal and industrial interests: At Hoover Dam on May 20th, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation hosted the seven Colorado River Basin states at a ceremony to celebrate the signing of the Colorado River […]

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Electric Vehicles = Mobile ATMs?

Via Medium, a report on a trial of an innovative use of blockchain trial that monetizes electric vehicle charging infrastructure, creating the potential for tokenized carbon credit trading: Highlights Power Ledger and Silicon Valley Power, the City of Santa Clara’s Municipal Electric Utility, have successfully implemented a blockchain-based solution for measuring and monetizing renewable electricity discharged […]

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How Utilities Can Adapt Cap And Trade For Water Security

Via The Source, an article on potential for utilities to adapt a ‘cap and trade’ approach to water security: In 1990, the US established the world’s first ever pollution trading system, popularised as “cap and trade.” Governments sought a new way to reduce levels of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide that had accumulated since the […]

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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.