The meter at your home or apartment recording your electricity consumption is one of the portals to a clean energy future — and to consumers spending considerably less on their power bills.
But to get to that future, those meters must be able to provide up-to-the-minute data to you, your utility company, the plug-in devices in your home and the growing array of businesses that can analyze the data and help you save on your electricity bills.
For that to happen, though, your energy data must be available in a standard format. Right now, it mostly isn’t.
The Biden administration had the chance to accelerate that transition last fall when it awarded a little more than $1 billion in “smart grid grants” to nearly three dozen electric utilities to improve the efficiency of the power grid. As a condition of the grants, the Energy Department should have required those utilities to provide electric meter data in a “portable” format so the information could move easily among different software applications, platforms and services.
But it didn’t. As of 2022, about three-quarters of all homes in the United States had so-called smart meters capable of, at a minimum, providing energy use information by hour and most in real time. Until this data is standardized and widely available — a concept known as data portability — the power grid will remain dumb and unnecessarily expensive. The grid will also be less able to accommodate growing sources of renewable energy, which requires balancing supply and demand throughout the day as wind and solar power production fluctuate with the weather.
The records of your energy consumption contain tremendous value. Studies have shown that consumers can use this information to cut their household energy use by 6 percent to 18 percent.
In a clean energy future, customers would, in effect, “own” this information and could choose to have it transmitted to services that pay them to save energy. The nonprofit coalition I run represents more than 25 companies that use electric meter data, where it is available, to help consumers economize on their electricity consumption.
This future would work in two ways.
Smartphone apps have been developed that can help you monitor and manage your energy use. By clicking a button, you would authorize your utility to allow the app to have access to your current and historical energy data. This would enable the company behind the app to help you save or earn money. If you conserve electricity at times of high demand, for example, the app company would pay you for doing so. Your conservation efforts might help avert a blackout on a blistering summer day when electricity demand soars.
In addition, you would be able to direct your electric meter to communicate directly with your appliances and other devices. Most electric meters can transmit real-time, second-by-second data on power usage. Your electric water heater could, for example, coordinate with your electric vehicle to avoid drawing large amounts of power simultaneously. This could lower electricity demand during expensive peak periods of use for a neighborhood or a region, reducing costs for everyone. But your energy provider has to enable your meter to communicate with those devices, which utilities generally have opposed.
Still, we have already seen glimpses of what this future could be.
During a 2022 heat wave in the West, California’s power grid operators asked OhmConnect, one of the companies in our coalition, to reach out to its 200,000 members to reduce their energy use. OhmConnect (recently renamed Renew Home) is a so-called virtual power plant, which gets paid by utilities and the energy markets for the electricity its members don’t use. The company urged its members by text and email to reduce their energy use during peak demand. It was also able to turn off specified appliances in homes with smart energy devices during those times. The energy saved over nine days was the equivalent of taking one million homes off the grid for an hour. In return, customers received over $2.7 million in gift cards and cash.
Other ideas are in development, such as paying a homeowner to use his electric vehicle’s stored energy elsewhere on the grid. These approaches align a customer’s self-interest with society’s interest.
Regulators in a few states, including California and New York, have taken steps toward making energy data portability a reality by enabling consumers to securely transmit their energy usage and billing information to a service selected by the consumer.
These early efforts are noteworthy but insufficient. America has about 3,000 electric utilities, most of them handling energy-use data in different formats. It’s a Tower of Babel out there, making it nearly impossible for such apps to work with every utility. More than a decade ago, the Energy Department helped develop a data standard called Green Button Connect My Data to solve this problem, but adoption by utilities was limited. Most utilities don’t want your meter to talk to smartphone apps in a competitive marketplace. Utilities are threatened by the prospect of paying customers to conserve energy instead of selling them more power.
Beginning in 2009, the Energy Department distributed more than $3 billion in grants to utilities to install millions more smart meters nationwide with data portability capability. But, as our research showed, utilities ended up deactivating the data-sharing features of 97 percent of those meters.
In the round of federal grant funding awarded last fall that affects what we calculate to be about 36 million homes and businesses, the Energy Department stopped short of requiring utilities receiving grants to provide energy data portability. It was encouraged but not required, according to a department spokesperson.
As a matter of federal policy, utilities receiving federal funds should not be able to block your data from being sent to energy management services at your request. It should be accessible on an open, nondiscriminatory basis to any device or service you choose. This stipulation would guard against utilities providing the information to some organizations but not others assisting consumers in economizing on their electricity use.
Utilities have raised concerns about data portability: consumer privacy, cybersecurity risks and cost. Privacy concerns can be addressed by requiring explicit informed consent from utility customers. Cybersecurity risks can be addressed with precautions such as read-only access and the use of tested internet security standards. The administration has proposed data portability rules for banking data and finalized other portability rules for personal health care data. If privacy and cybersecurity can be managed in those contexts, they can be addressed for electricity. As for the cost, it is a tiny fraction of the costs of the electricity infrastructure, only about a few dollars per customer, and is dropping as more software firms support the Green Button data standard. In any case, those costs should be reimbursed by the Energy Department.
Encouraging data portability is not enough. The White House must support clean-energy innovation by mandating that electric utilities offer portability in return for federal grants. Consumers should have control over their electric meter data. Yes, the companies my coalition represents will benefit. But so will consumers. And so will the essential transition to clean energy.
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