IBM releases report gauging consumer attitudes about the smart grid
I stopped counting the number of IBM smart grid announcements I received a while ago, so it was nice to know that someone there IS keeping up for me: so far, IBM has snagged a role in nearly 50 smart grid projects across all sorts of markets. Here is a compendium of the releases, in case you want to bookmark it.
The reason I finally hunkered down to write about several of the things that it is doing is that IBM has released a report that I figured might interest anyone who is dialed into regular smart grid updates. The report is called "Lighting the Way: Understanding the smart energy consumer," and it represents the responses of more than 5,000 energy consumers from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, France, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Here are some very high-level findings that IBM highlights:
- Consumers between the age of 18 and 34 were the most likely to be interested in self-service and automated energy management features promised by smart grid applications. (Not really surprising.)
- More people in this group than in the other age brackets said they would be willing to pay a one-time fee (up to $100) for this service. (Pretty surprising.)
- The under-25 set within the survey respondents also said they'd be willing to way for a service that sends a message to a handheld, phone or other mobile device in case of an outage.