Comments
While it will be important to engage people and processes throughout the organization, I do also believe that the technology needs to be in place to give decision-makers at all levels access to tools and applications that they can and perhaps must use to assess the safety and risk implications of their operational decisions. This follows the comments trail on Dana Wiklund's blog about enterprise risk management.
Ah, but there are some analytics out there that are in use in many utility web portals that do a bill disaggregation which is modeled. This does not require sensors on each of your energy-intensive end uses, but instead, combines meter data with weather data and some basic information about your appliances and energy consumption behavior to come up with a profile of your energy usage by end use, using an iterative analysis. It's estimated though. Not sure whether sensors will be the next phase or whether the trend will be to go right to the smart appliance to get end-use specific consumption. By the way, I purchased a refrigerator last night from one of the major appliance retailers in Boston and asked the sales person when he thought I could get a "smart refrigerator". Not anytime soon was the answer.
Thanks, Aravind. The list keeps growing every day. I'm at Microsoft World Partners Conference this week, so expect to get an even closer look at Hohm.
`I've been thinking a lot about the "black swan" approaches to risk. It has become clear lately that there are some usual occurances that have a very low probably of happening, but a high impact if they do. What comes to mind for most is what we are seeing today in the Gulf of Mexico with BP's deep water drilling. Although the details are still coming out, it seems that the series of decisions that were made by BP at the very beginning of the project and the day of the accident might have been differnt, had the decision-makers been able to project the possible impacts to the corporate in the event of a massive oil spill. In some ways, enterprise risk has to be something that is assess not just at the corporate level, but also operational decisions need to somehow be subject to risk modeling.
One more recent example of a company to follow when it comes to presenting information to the customer about their energy consumption. Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative in Texas just rolled out their Net Energy Market. Although it doesn't include benchmarking, the application does allow customers to set monthly energy goals and receive a text message, e-mail or phone alert when they are exceeding their goals. Siemens IT professional services group did this implementation using eMeter's products.
From what I understand, is that for legal purposes, companies may need to keep their own internal document management system as well as using that in the cloud, but you pose an interesting question. Curious about what others think about this.
Recently we conducted research with 144 oil and gas companies in North America and found that only 12.4% were currently using cloud, with and other 8.4% planning to implement some cloud in the next year. This is the first time we asked this question, so it will be interesting to do trending on this in next year's survey.
I agree as well. Certainly this is already happening with the moratorium on deepwater drilling. I expect that there will be much more monitoring and reporting requirements for the industry.
You are correct that technology alone is not the answer. There ceratainly was enough information technology to provide sufficient data and information to determine that there were some potential problems with capping off the well, in my reading of the various reports of the incident. It was the human decision-making that was flawed. In the risk management world, this might be considered a black swam event where a number of missteps cascades into a disaster. One would hope that oil and gas companies will be quicker to use risk analytics at the operational level. For example, a risk tool could help a decisionmaker weigh the risks of both common and black swan events against the costs of taking certain actions.
Just a little further elaboration on the customer backlash. Law suits alleging inaccuracies in billing due to smart meters have generated some customer backlash, at least against smart meters. Regulators and utilities have responded by performing additional meter tests. Utilities have responded by increasing transparency into meter data validation. For example, one utility is testing meter performance as the number of meters installed increases. Other utilities are running smart meters in parallel with electro-mechanical meters. Still other utilities that had been considering smart metering have extend the planning stage before proceeding to implementation. What the experience in California and Texas has pointed up, is that utilities need to be more pro-active in promoting the benefits of smart metering to their customers and to helping their customers understand how to use technology. IDC Energy Insights believes that recent events may cause some utilities to prolong the planning stage, but will not stop investment in intelligent grid technologies in most regions.
If Google does go in for a trading arm, not just to hedge, but to speculate, they will surely be in the market for energy trading and risk management (ETRM) applications to support their trading desk. And whatever Google does, Microsoft will not be far behind.
While I do agree that the license is most likely for trading, another interesting wrinkle is that Google now has access to consumer demand information through their agreement with utilities for their personal energy management software, PowerMeter. But, I suspect only for those customers who opt into the Google program.
