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The company have been consistent that its project was originally intended to be, and remains, a testbed. With a move to offload costs to its customers, for what is effectively an R&D experiment, Xcel is taking a risky path. On one hand, I give them credit for having the temerity to soften the financial blow to its shareholders of a project that is incurring significant cost overruns. On the other hand, this could wake the sleeping giant of consumer voices not just in CO but in other 'smart city' projects as well. Questions of whether other utilities will take the same approach will be a legitimate concern for other state regulators as well. But those considerations are pure speculation from where I sit.....
The real head scratcher is why they chose fiber in the first place. From what I was told by the company last year the cost of fiber was approximately $2,000 per house in the pilot. Even though they believed a target of $500 per house was achievable on a full deployment basis. And that was the estimated per household price before cost overruns. And for reasons that are hard to rationalize, just what do you need fiber to the home for? It's the equivalent of buying a long haul tractor trailer to do the weekly grocery shopping for a family of four. It doesn't add up when other alternatives are available whether utility deployed wireless, or 3rd party public networks like Verizon or AT&T.
In all fairness to Xcel, the company stated Smart Grid City is about testing technology first and the business model second. In other utility deployments with smart meters and communications networks, too much focus on the business case resulted in questionable technology selections for the single purpose of supporting meter interval data, for example. Perhaps some lessons on striking the right balance between the technology and the business case will result from some of these investment profiles.
At the time of the announcement, I wondered about the same, that is - by not selecting good projects that seemingly exemplified a smart grid strategy - what was the DOE signaling to the market place? While the DOE provided guidelines, the public did not have visibility into the detailed review criteria or grading system. It might be too much to ask of the DOE as it might call into question the dept's judgement even more than in the absence of a public disclosure. I would imagine there has to be an appreciable political element too that considers economic need of the state, past federal monies recv'd, etc.
I agree a more democratic approach would include more dispersments at smaller amounts. The pro-rated idea, however, carries its own draw backs such as a process that inherently includes apples to oranges comparisons, funding potentially wasteful (read:pork :) projects or antiquated technology.
Another example of social media at work is the University of Mississippi's installation SmartSynch's technology at campus buildings. The project will support the college's effort to reduce energy consumption. A key function is to socialize the real-time information via the internet and among the close knit college community. It is believed that competition will flourish (to influence behavior) by pitting intra-campus schools, dormatories or even cross state campuses against each other for lowest energy consumption. There is a degree of validity to the approach of influencing behavior by showing neighbors each other's energy usage. A vendor called Opower is testing this approach with utilities in what can be construed as an enhanced energy efficiency program for residential customers. Opower presents the energy usage of a single consumer against a logical representation of groups of neighboring consumer e.g. zip code, like-zoning clusters, socia-economic data, house size, etc. While all the data is anonymous, the effect is a consistent 2.4% drop in energy demand across all 12 months. This indicates a degree of sustained behavior modification is indeed possible.
