smartphone-green

Today’s smartphone-equipped, attention-span-starved consumers are inundated with data all day long, keeping up with family and friends, running their professional and business lives, and staying up to date with the latest in green technology news or celebrity gossip. All of this data comes to us in as close to real time as possible, making us demanding consumers of information indeed.

But the smart grid hasn’t delivered home energy data that fast. Today’s smart meter networks and Green Button-enabled consumer energy portals typically deliver energy usage that’s at least 24 hours old. That’s useful for those people who like to pore over charts to plot their household energy efficiency, but let’s face it, most of us aren’t that person.

Colorado municipal utility Fort Collins Utilities is trying a different approach: speeding up the smart-meter-to-back-office-data collection loop, and putting it out to customers every 15 minutes. That might be fast enough to get people involved in energy on a day-to-day basis, if it’s accurate and comes along with information on how they can save money in the process.

That’s the goal that Siemens has set for itself with Fort Collins, which last week became the first utility in the world to launch that company's Energy Engage Mobile application to customers. It’s the latest customer engagement platform from eMeter, the meter data management software startup that Siemens bought in 2011, which it has since turned into a core part of itsintegrated smart grid software vision.

Fort Collins is a long-time customer of eMeter’s EnergyIP platform to manage the data coming from its 100,000 smart electric and water meters installed at homes, businesses and schools throughout the city. But like most other utilities in the country, Fort Collins had been pulling data from those smart meters in hourly increments, consolidating it into 8-hour blocks, and then turning it around to customers the next day.

These are speeds set by the imperatives of the utility’s billing department, not by the desires of smartphone-enabled consumers. Reconfiguring the smart-meter-to-MDMS system to pull data faster is a complex task, but one that eMeter has built into its EnergyIP platform, as Lisa Caswell, eMeter president, explained in an interview last week.