April, 2009

Selling the smart grid

“It turns out customers don’t actually want utilities to turn off their appliances.”
~ Mark Farber, Photon Consultants

Well, there’s a shock. In her post on Earth2Tech.com, Josie Garthwaite writes about the challenge of convincing consumers that smart grid technologies are actually in their best interests. Here’s an excerpt:

Making the smart grid’s most basic elements — two-way communication between utilities and energy users, advanced control systems and smart devices — appealing to consumers could be key to its success. So how can smart grid backers make the investment look more like a boon, and less like a boondoggle for those on the other side of the meter?

For many utilities, adding information technology and two-way controls to electronic devices and appliances represents a potential gold mine of efficiency and a workaround for building expensive new power plants. As Farber put it, “A button is as close to a dispatchable power plant that you can imagine.”

For consumers, however, the benefits of the smart grid have proven to be less obvious, despite promises that it will offer more insight and control over their energy use (and spending). “It turns out customers don’t actually want utilities to turn off their appliances,” said Farber, referring to the two-way control technology that would allow a utility to cut power use when demand strains supply.

If that translates to my espresso machine sputtering to a halt when I need it most… I’m not sure I could be convinced.

So I updated the IT humor guide…

Here it is, Sunday afternoon. I thought I’d just pop into my office (Yes, that’s one of the perils of working from home.) and finish up a definition for IP surveillance, maybe update the blog. But first, I checked the editors’ mailbox. And there was a note from a reader suggesting his Web series for inclusion in our Fast Guide to IT Humor. The series was pretty funny, I thought, so I went into our content management app to edit it into the guide. And there went my afternoon. “While I’m in here,” I thought, back all those hours ago, “I’ll check the links for rot.” Oh my. There are a lot of links. I’m happy to say that most of the URLs still worked but even whatever fraction of the links it was that were bad took a while to fix/remove.

Okay. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit that I did a little revisiting. I mean, how is one to resist trying to find out what Jessica Simpson has to say about “Open source routers?” (They’re HOT, apparently.)  And there’s much more. Much, much more.

Have you got any favorite IT humor sites? Let me know. Maybe next Sunday, I’ll update again…

Mark Day — Smiley intervention

Wes Borg — Internet Help Desk