The Electrical Speeding Ticket

A friend of mine showed me an interesting piece of mail he received recently. It was a traffic violation ticket! A few weeks earlier, he got tripped up in a red light on New York City’s West Side Highway (not that hard to do if you’ve ever driven it). Sure enough, a camera snapped a photo of his license plate, routed the information to the appropriate city department, and issued him a ticket by mail.

Given all the comparisons of our nation’s electrical grid to our vast system of roads and highways, I couldn’t help but think about the factors that made this ticket so noteworthy. For one, there was some novelty in getting a ticket by mail because of a hidden camera. The ticket was also costly. Finally, it was unexpected.

Utilities are not planning on installing cameras outside your home, however they are investing billions in new technologies to monitor the health of the grid and the utilization of energy in real-time. They’re also deploying ‘smart meters’ to replace your existing meter. Instead of someone coming out to physically read your meter on a regular basis, smart meters will communicate real-time energy usage data back to the utility as well as to an energy management display in your home (costs extra). The displays will not only tell you how much energy you’re using, but also what it’s costing you. These Smart Grid technologies are most often positioned as tools that can help us reduce our energy bills. Perhaps a better way to position them is as tools that will help us to act more responsibly with our energy usage. The alternative may be an electrical 'speeding ticket' of sorts. For example, your energy bill for running your dryer or washing your dishes between the hours of 4 and 8pm may cost you three to four times as much as it would outside of those hours of the day.

In the future, we’ll all be extra careful when traveling on the West Side Highway. And, if one of us should happen to get tripped up in a red light, you can pretty much expect to get a ticket in the mail. The cost of the ticket however, may still be troublesome.

Utilities face a similar challenge in keeping customers engaged and educated when the novelty of these new technologies wears off. More importantly, they need to provide us with highly attainable energy conservation goals, with rather manageable and expected cost consequences.

Incidentally, I relayed this ticket-by-mail story to an executive from the U.K. the other week. Speeding cameras are apparently quite prevalent in the U.K. and many operate by with a dual flash setup. A car traveling at excessive speeds will trigger an initial flash. A second flash is used to calculate your exact speed based on where your car appears in the second frame. A rather ingenious colleague of his, with a fast and fancy car to match, calculated that if you pass through the camera in excess of 130mph you could elude the 2nd frame altogether, and escape the ticket in the process.

I’m afraid I’ve made far too much light of running red lights and driving at excessive speeds. Nevertheless, it’s time to start learning the new rules of the electrical super-highway.