SEEDR is invited by the Tennenbaum Institute at Georgia Tech to participate in a “Summer Project on Smart Grid.” Participants include graduate students from the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech and Dr. William B. Rouse of the Tennenbaum Institute. The course will be hosted by the Tennenbaum Institute from May 17 through July 26.

The Smart Grid project will focus on consumer embrace of the Smart Grid including how to empower, enable, and motivate consumers to actively participate in the Smart Grid. The cost of such an initiative is enormous and the expected return on this investment is highly dependent on consumer acceptance of managing their own use of electricity and the technology and systems that enable electricity management. The course is also expected to consider the intelligent design of other utilities such as gas and water.

A recent report from Accenture entitled Understanding Consumer Preferences in Energy Efficiency surveyed more than 9,000 energy customers in seventeen countries that suggests there is considerable opposition to smart meters and other smart grid technologies promise to provide households with real-time data on their energy use and allow energy firms to reduce peak demand by automatically turning off non-essential appliances. Consumers simply do not trust the energy companies to commercialize their usage data. As understandable as this may seem, this presents tremendous opportunities for third-party providers to provide solutions.

“Consumer acceptance of the Smart Grid is centered on the cost of adopting new technologies; pervasiveness and user interface of those technologies; and consumer privacy and security,” said Donald Moreland, SEEDR Director. “Despite consumer skepticism, a tremendous opportunity exists for companies with emerging technologies and business models to bridge the gap between the consumer and industry.”

SEEDR’s work in Smart Grid includes the development of collaborative program initiatives that endorse open architecture, plug-and-play components, open standards, and promote interoperability. SEEDR brings together the philanthropy, business leaders, policy makers, and academia in a consortium of stakeholders to initiate small-scale Smart Grid pilot programs and assist in applying results to large-scale implementation. “This is a great opportunity for SEEDR to collaborate with the Tennenbaum Institute and talented graduate students from the top industrial and systems engineering program in the country.”