The McDonnell Group

By Don McDonnell

DENVER - June 9, 2011 - The smart grid remains an enigma to most consumers.  While I have a lot of friends and colleagues from there from over the years, KEMA was in some sense still an enigma to me, at least until this week.  I attended KEMA’s 4th annual utility executive leadership forum in Denver because of the strength of the speaker line up.  I came away not only with a better understanding of the role that KEMA plays in smart grid market developments, but also with an understanding of why KEMA’s smart grid sherpa marketing campaign is certainly fitting to their role.  I’ll be unpacking the Patagonia back packs of several speaker panels from the forum with my perspectives added here in posts over the course of the next two weeks.

Hugo van Nispen, president and managing director of KEMA North America, set the tone for the meeting in his opening remarks when he asserted that, in order to shape the future, utilities must engage consumers and put the voice of the customer at the center of future strategy. He challenged conference participants on the issue of consumer engagement, “do we want to follow or do we want to lead?”

While conference C-level panels covered a broad range of topics including utility strategy, sustainability, and the resurgence of natural gas in the smart grid paradigm among many others,  the topic of customer engagement and new utility business models to support this loomed large. van Nispen noted that new utility market entrants are betting that utilities will ceed the future of customer engagement to newcomers.

Many utility panelists acknowledged the important role that new technology and market newcomers will play, and some invited the notion of value-added services beyond the meter from participants other than utilities.  The notion of customer choice, a politically loaded term in the utility and regulatory community, and the corollary of consumer engagement was addressed holistically at this event.  But the “d” word “disintermediation” was uttered more than once.  The importance of careful expectation setting with consumers was also a recurring theme. 

Panelists asserted that integrated investor owned utility business models could evolve to meet the transformation challenge short of complete market restructuring.  On the opening panel Ken DeFontes, president and CEO of Baltimore Gas and Electric set the stage for the two day event when he commented, “Smart Grid developments are the single most impactful thing I’ve seen in my 39 years in the utility business.” 

Next week I’ll share some perspectives from the Panel The View from 30,000 Feet and The Road to Sustainability.   For me, an important theme across the conference was “engage or beware.”   Smart grid crevasse loom large, but this conference and its open and honest dialogue helped chart a good number of them.   It will be interesting to see what comes out of the White House based on the event planned for Monday June 13th.  Hopefully the industry can avoid the politicization of smart grid efforts. It’s too important for partisan politics.  For a multi-stakeholder take on smart grid consumer engagement visit The Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative at: http://smartgridcc.org/