What do consumers think of the smart grid? Um, not much
Summary: There's a new poll out from Harris Interactive gauging consumers' perception of the smart grid and smart meters. Turns out they don't have much of one.
There's a new poll out from Harris Interactive gauging consumers' perception of the smart grid and smart meters. Turns out they don't have much of one. In fact, close to 70 percent of them have never heard of the smart grid and about 63 percent haven't a clue about smart meters. Those who ARE aware of the smart grid are concerned about the security around it, which is another thing that technology players should be worrying about. ZDNet Editorial Director Larry Dignan dissects the results further over in this post at our SmartPlanet sister blog site.
This reinforces my believe that in order for all this to work, it has to be transparent. I mean, come on: Just because you CAN monitor your energy usage and adjust it from a remote location doesn't mean that you WILL do it. And how many people you know are excited about paying to update their thermostats or other gadgets necessary to start collecting energy data. Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?
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Talkback
I would actually..
No practical justification for the smart grid
What will be interesting, is if the Vermont legislature denies the extension for the Yankee Nuclear Power plant which supplies 70% of Vermont's electricity. Then it will be fun to watch how effective all the greenies conservation mantras will work out.
You have just summed up the entire
Controlling people.
It doesn't realy matter anyway.
Last year we spent 15,000 USD making improvements to our house. Making it more energy efficient. We hired professional high quality companies to come in and do the work and do the physical testing. I was able to independently verify that we knocked 25% off our usage. In other words after our improvements we were using 25% less power in our daily lives than before. Our local power company decided that because the local government wouldn't let them raise their rates and tried to force them to give discounts to people who did what we did and made our energy usage more efficient, the energy company added "delivery fee" to the bill. It was 15% more than our old bills. Instead of getting a 25% discount from our old bills, we got an increase of 15%. This was on top of the money we spent on our house. Plus apparently after our modifications our property is now worth more and are property taxes are even higher than before.
With this new "delivery fee" the energy company can slide your bill around to where ever they want the final dollar amount to be.
I was all for "greening" up my home but I have paid a steep premium for it.
News flash for you
guess what? When you pay less for energy, they get less tax revenue.
Doesn't Surprise Me
I do know my property taxes went up and the only improvements we made to the property and the home where related to making our house more energy efficient.
I do know that we actually got the 25% discount but the "delivery fee" covered that discount and added 15% on top of it. So basically we got a 25% decrease for usage and a 35% increase for "Delivery fees".
The bottom line is we are paying 15% more this year after our home improvements than in past years before the improvements.
RE: What do consumers think of the smart grid? Um, not much
I've got old thermostats, really old, no digital read for temp, setting...new "smart" IP enabled thermostats might be handy, but they are going to use energy just displaying, processing, otherwise handling all that data, right? Same with "smart meters".
And what about people living in "rural" areas, you know, with dialup only...is the theremostat or meter going to initiate a dialup connection every 15 minutes???
Then you have some people saying to unplug all devices when not in use, everything, televisions, radios, toasters, wall-wart chargers, clocks...is this really a workable solution? How much time would I spend resetting all the timers on various devices?
I'm not convinced these ideas are "consumer friendly".