Comments on: Marketing Home Energy Management Without Utilities

By: David Schatsky

David Schatsky — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:52:33 +0000

Hi Arun,

Thanks for your comment.

By: Arun Mathur

Arun Mathur — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:20:58 +0000

Enjoyed the post. I’ve already come across a number of home energy monitoring and management solutions that bypass the utility. Whether you’re working with or without the utilities, this is a crowded space. Hopefully they’ll all get an opportunity to deploy enough units to gather some data that adequately differentiates their solutions from one another.

These systems will start to provide real benefit to consumers once they start facing higher prices. However, I don’t think utilities can push through meaningful price-hikes or TOU rate structures without supplying their customers with the tools (smart meters and complementary displays) that enable them to maintain or lower their monthly bills. To that end, utilities really are in the driver’s seat on this movement. Solutions that by-pass the utility may be limited to the Prius community and households whose electric bills far exceed the local average.

Ted’s comment and suggestion above is quite a good one. I only wonder if this would be difficult given the heavy regulation and oversight…

By: Ted Dann

Ted Dann — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 02:10:05 +0000

Perhaps utilities could charge a premium for not having an energy monitoring system installed? Not much, maybe $5 per month. If the utilities are willing to pay for customers to have these displays installed, they can offset the cost with the premiums received from other customers that refuse the installation.

It’s the principle of the matter: either you get a display or you pay more for your energy. The worst case scenario is that a customer gets the display and ignoring it.

This would most definitely speed up the adoption of these displays and ultimately lead to greater energy consumption awareness.

This might be monopolistic behavior…but if you are the biggest dog on the block, throw your weight around to make some changes for the better.