Most electricity ratepayers in the US have a smart meter generating real-time data about their power usage, which could theoretically be used to reduce consumption and save money, but in most cases, utilities have locked up the information in inaccessible formats. In this episode, Michael Murray, leader of business coalition Mission:data, describes the potential value of smart meter data and the group’s ongoing efforts to pry it from utilities.
Text transcript:
David Roberts
Thanks in no small part to Obama stimulus spending, there are something like 115 million smart meters — advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), in the lingo — installed on buildings nationwide. Around 80 percent of ratepayers have one.
Unlike analog meters, read once a month by a human meter reader, smart meters are digital and produce real-time information on energy usage that is transmitted to the utility. Consumers could, at least theoretically, use that information to inform energy management tools or third-party services that help them reduce energy usage, participate in demand-response programs, and save money.
For consumers to do that, however, the information has to be accessible, and in the vast majority of cases, US power utilities bottle it up. They turn off features of smart meters or keep the information in proprietary, difficult-to-access formats. The result is a patchwork that makes growing a demand-response or other distributed-energy business unnecessarily difficult.
Michael Murray leads Mission:data, a coalition of businesses that has been waging a campaign to free smart-meter data — to make it easily accessible, on a real-time basis, in standardized formats, to consumers and those with whom they choose to share it — for some eight years now. I’m going to talk with him about the power of this data, what might be done with it, and how it might be pried from utility hands.
Okay. All right, then, with no further ado, Michael Murray of the Mission:data coalition. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Michael Murray
Thank you, David. It's an honor to be here.
David Roberts
Let's start... Where to start? Let's start with what a meter is and then what a smart meter is. So, I think most people are aware that there's a device on the side of their house that basically electricity from the grid comes through to go into the house, and that meter basically records how much power is coming into the house. That's a basic electric meter. Been around from the beginning. So, what is a smart meter, and when did they come on the scene? Just tell us a little bit about this sort of history of the smart meter phenomenon.
Michael Murray
You bet. And there's been a lot of ink spilled on smart meters over the last 15 or 20 years.
David Roberts
This is a weird thing. Like, the whole smart grid thing is really kind of coming into its own right now. But I've been hearing about smart meters, I feel like, since the early 2010s and, like, nothing ever — this is one of the things I kind of want to talk about. Like, they've been around forever. But nothing ever came out of them. Like, I never heard any follow-up. Like, what are we doing with them? What are they doing? Are they achieving anything? Just like they've been one of the pieces of the smart grid that's been around for the longest, but weirdly unconnected to anything else and with no consequences.
Michael Murray
That's right.
David Roberts
Sorry to interrupt, but just like, the whole thing is weird to me. So tell me what happened.
Michael Murray
Okay, so there have been a lot of disappointments with smart meters and how they've been used, no question about it. But the idea was a good one. And the idea was predominantly you had to change from monthly meter readings to, you know, once every 15 minutes or sometimes once an hour. So the whole time-of-use pricing is sort of underpinned by the need for smart meters. You know, there are very important shifts that can happen, you know, to accommodate more renewables, for example, if you have that hourly type of metering. So all of those things are important, but fundamentally, you just need a little bit of computing and a little bit of memory on the meter.
And, you know, in the 1980s, it was just a spinning disk.
David Roberts
I remember the spinning disk.
Michael Murray
Yes, your listeners who have solar, you know, everyone gets a little bit of pleasure out of, you know, watching the meter spin backwards when the sun is out. That's very satisfying. And those largely have been replaced with digital meters of some sort. And from the utilities' perspective, what was most important was getting rid of the meter readers, the people that would walk in your backyard.
David Roberts
Because of labor costs?
Michael Murray
Exactly. Well, and they could make more money if it were a capital asset as opposed to labor. And so, you had this big shift. And frankly, a lot of the hype around smart meters was by the utilities who were salivating over the rate base opportunities there.
So, that was one of the big pushes. Again, it's not a bad idea. I think there were some cases where utilities had put in meters that had a small radio in them, where you could drive by in a car and pick up the readings. And that's maybe not what you and I would refer to as a truly smart meter because it still required someone to drive around into every neighborhood. But eventually, we got to a point where there were digitally communicating meters with some sort of network behind it, where there's a low bandwidth, ongoing communication from the meter back to the utility.
And we're pretty widespread right now. You know, we're talking 120 million across the US.
David Roberts
120 million? Yep. Okay, so a smart meter is just, it's digital, it measures much more frequently than the dumb analog meter, and it can communicate with the utility. That's what we mean by smart meter. How did this one little piece of the smart grid that, like I said, seems weirdly unconnected to any other piece, get to be so ubiquitous, like how did we end up with 120 million? And like, what is the math on that? Like what percentage of households out —
Michael Murray
Out of about 165 million total for all commercial, residential, industrial customers nationwide.
David Roberts
Oh, so most?
Michael Murray
Yeah, no, it's most, yeah, it's, what is that, 70-ish percent? Yeah. So we're up there.
David Roberts
I see. So, most meters now then are some form of smart.
Michael Murray
That's right. And again, it still depends where you are. There's still major smart meter deployments that are underway in states like New York. Massachusetts has sort of begun theirs recently. There are stretches of Ohio and the Midwest that do not have them. A lot of rural electric cooperatives and some municipals still don't have them. So the push was certainly by the investor-owned utilities because again, they could make money. But we shouldn't — you know, some of that was, you know, we can criticize them for just wanting to make money and taking some shortcuts.
David Roberts
Oh, I do.
Michael Murray
But some of it was, was a very legitimate, you know, need for improving the quality of service, the ability to bill and so on.
David Roberts
The Stimulus Act. Obama's Stimulus Act, you know, I was reading through your materials. Obama's Stimulus Act spent a bunch of money spreading these things around. So, like, one question I had is like, if the utility can deploy these and count it as a capital expenditure. So, you know, Volts listeners will recall that investor-owned utilities make money by spending money. They make a rate of return on their investments, which results in all sorts of weird, distorted incentives. But if they can put the smart meters in their rate base, that seems like great for them. Why do they need subsidies?
Why did it take a bunch of subsidies to get them to do this? It seems like they would just want to do that regardless.
Michael Murray
That's a good point. You'd have to go back to Congress and what they were thinking at the time with the Recovery Act. Going back in history to ask Congress what they meant is always an exercise in futility.
David Roberts
It's originalism. That's a favorite indoor sport now.
Michael Murray
That's right. So, there was $3 billion that was set aside in a smart grid investment grant, and it was actually dated back to 2005. There's an Energy Independence and Security Act, I believe under Bush, that sort of created this vehicle within the Department of Energy, and then that vehicle existed. And then when the economy crashed in '08 and '09, they basically filled up this particular bucket with $3 billion. And at the time, smart meters were still relatively new. There was some technological risk. Duke Energy, Ohio, actually invested in a system from a meter vendor that ended up, you know, completely leaving the space.
And they were sort of left stranded with this, you know, large, expensive system that had to be replaced prematurely.
David Roberts
Am I making this up? Do I also remember a flurry of weird conspiracy theories, like around 2010? Like, the data from smart meters was corrupting your bodily fluids or something. Am I remembering all that?
Michael Murray
Right, so, there definitely were radio frequency concerns that were very strong.
David Roberts
Yeah, out in California, out in Southern California, all the hippies were like, "Don't radio my brain, man."
Michael Murray
There were class action lawsuits. Naperville, Illinois was another one. Some really interesting case law sort of, you know, about privacy and the right to opt out there. But, you know, most utilities now have an opt-out program for advanced meters to sort of cater to that group who are very violently opposed to it. The opt-out rates are, you know, a fraction of a percent.
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah. It seemed like that kind of came in when it didn't ever turn into much of a big thing.
Michael Murray
That's right. Yeah.
David Roberts
So now utilities, most utilities have data about their customers' consumption every 15 minutes, let's say, is like, is that, is that like generally sort of the baseline for smart meters, or do they vary a lot in how often they measure?
Michael Murray
So, they vary. And this, again, is one of my frustrations that my organization is working on. In California, it was originally set up to be once an hour.
David Roberts
It doesn't seem that smart to me, honestly.
Michael Murray
Well, again, at the time, there were real bandwidth limitations, data storage. I mean, it seems ridiculous when we have smartphones and everything, but at the time, those were some concerns. And actually, I spoke with an old veteran from some of the smart meter deployment battles in California. And he told me that because at the time they were thinking actually about a bandwidth over power line type of communications network that was like worse than AOL dial-up from 1992. What ended up happening is there was a settlement conference with the consumer advocate who was afraid of the prices changing every five minutes.
'Cause as a consumer, that might be very hard to adapt to. So, they had an understandable ratepayer concern, and there was a compromise that was struck that said, "Well, I think about an hour sounds fine. We probably won't change the rates more than once an hour." And it stuck. But now, we are in a situation where the California Independent System Operator really needs five or 15 minutes information for their market. And so, there's a mismatch in the time intervals. And that's one of the problems we've seen.
David Roberts
Yeah, if a meter is doing once-an-hour readings, is it physically capable of doing more frequent readings, or would you have to install a new meter?
Michael Murray
Some are, and in the case of California, PG&E's meters are certainly capable of doing that. The utility would send down what's called a new meter program over this radio network, and it would begin collecting at 15 minutes. And this just sort of kills me how frustrating it is. PG&E's proposal for reprogramming one of those meters ended up being, I think, it was $40 per meter for an over-the-air software update.
David Roberts
For an update over the air?
Michael Murray
Yes.
David Roberts
Is there, I mean, is there any physical cost to that?
Michael Murray
There isn't. And it's hard not to look at a price like that and say, "Are you just trying to hurt demand response?" I mean, is there some sort of nefarious angle? Now, you know, in their defense, there is some cost. The back-end software that they were using needed upgrades, et cetera, et cetera. There's sort of an oligopoly of large software companies that provide those services. And so they sort of have the utilities over a barrel. So again, I'm not defending it, just saying that those are some of the dynamics. California has been desperately trying to incorporate more demand response ever since the 2001 electricity crisis.
And here we are faced with an opportunity to help improve that. Unfortunately, the demand response, one of the main demand response programs in California, has this unfortunate ratepayer cost of reprogramming all of the meters.
David Roberts
Funny. So, the majority of consumers now have smart meters, which means the majority of utilities now have more fine-grained data about the consumption of their ratepayers. So, just tell me, like, what is the basic proposition of Mission:data? Like, how do utilities treat that information now and what do you want them to do?
Michael Murray
Most utilities, not all, but most, treat it as simply something for determining bills. It's a way to make billing easier, cheaper, and more accurate. There are even some utilities that say that information on your bill, 15 minutes usage data, and maybe what that says about your usage habits, your behaviors, all that sort of thing, that's the proprietary information of the utility.
David Roberts
Huh.
Michael Murray
And so, they often view it as a sort of competitive edge. You know, I'm aware of the irony that they're monopolies, and so shouldn't worry about this. But that's often what they say and at Mission:data, as a nonprofit organization, our view is that that's really the customer's data. It belongs to them. It's up to them to use it how they wish. Often, because it does reveal information that could potentially be sensitive about you and your life and what you do in your house. You know, I'm not going to argue and say it's the most sensitive information in the whole world, but there's a reasonable privacy argument that that should be under your control.
David Roberts
So, utilities are saying, "This is our information." So even me, as a consumer, like if I wanted to get that information from the utility and give it to someone else so that they could help me say, reduce my power consumption, I can't. I have no legal right to that data. Is that right?
Michael Murray
I think utilities realize that even depriving you from having that information is a non-starter. So, what they've done is they said, "Okay, we'll provide a website where you go pay your bill and you can get your information, but it's only for you, it's for your eyes only, and maybe we'll make it available in a downloadable format of some sort. But if you ever wanted an automated connection to an energy management service, that's when the hammer comes."
David Roberts
Like, you can't be downloading PDFs and emailing them to some company that's trying to do real-time demand response.
Michael Murray
Exactly, and that's where the wheels come off. And so, our argument is that, you know, particularly because they're monopolies, because we have no choice in the selection of these meters and the technology, we ought to be able to say, you know, with the click of a button, "I want my information sent to this heat pump installer," or "I want it sent to this demand response company," or whoever I want for whatever purpose.
David Roberts
Or not even so much "sent to them" as, "I want them to have real-time access to it," so they can see it in real time.
Michael Murray
Correct. And we can get into the historical information versus real time. There are different sorts of channels. But the point is that that has been a battleground because, going back to 2009, the rhetoric from utilities was this very lofty, "Smart meters are going to be these magical things that get your data from your meter and then they help your devices and appliances respond in real time," that sort of thing. Well, the utilities realized, "We just want to provide this information to the customer. We don't actually want these devices and other companies and other people having a view into what's going on."
They oftentimes, you know, these are monopolies. They act to protect that monopoly. And part of that sort of defense is keeping out, you know, aggregators and other sources of, you know, "competition," whatever that might mean.
David Roberts
Yeah, and it is worth noting that almost any use case that a third party would have for your information would be in the context of helping you use less energy. Right? Like helping you reduce your energy consumption, which the utility doesn't necessarily want to help you do.
Michael Murray
Exactly. There's all sorts of anti-competitive impulses there. You know, you may also be aware of utilities that have affiliates in wholesale markets that are generators and so they don't have an interest in, you know, let's say, demand response being really successful because that would have a depressive effect on the wholesale market prices.
David Roberts
Right. Directly competing with their generators.
Michael Murray
Correct. And that's not true in all states. But those are some of the dynamics that we see. And this is where all of the rhetoric about smart meters really hit a brick wall in the 2013-2014 timeframe. This is when Mission:data started, because we started going to utilities asking, "Hey, you've done smart meters, now give us your information. This is a treasure trove. You promised it would be available, etcetera, etcetera." Billions of dollars of taxpayer and ratepayer money was spent on it.
David Roberts
Yeah, really wild. This is taxpayer money that created this information.
Michael Murray
Yes, that's right. And unfortunately, most of the utilities did not provide any sort of automated way for that information to be transferred. So, we did a report in 2022 that showed that the Recovery Act money, this is the $3 billion that we talked about earlier. About 14 million of those meters were taxpayer-funded. And they have a Zigbee radio inside, which is a communications radio. It's a little bit like Bluetooth that can communicate to devices inside the home. And we found that ten years after the Recovery Act funding, 97% of all of those meters had that capability deactivated by the utility.
David Roberts
So, they're not — so they have the technical capability of real-time communication with devices and third parties, but utilities just turned it off.
Michael Murray
Correct. And there was very little accountability for that. Of course, we've been fighting, you know, state by state to make this information more accessible with whatever metering technology the utility may have. And unfortunately, we just see a lot of heels being dug in. The utilities say, "We're not going to do it. You can't make us do it."
David Roberts
Well, such a classic utility thing. Like, I'm sure they'll be dragged kicking and screaming every step because it's just, you know, to return to a familiar theme, they don't want you to use less energy. They are, by their financial incentives, opposed to the social and environmental goals that we've set for ourselves. The whole situation is absurd. And this is yet another example. So, tell me, it seems like one of the things you would need if you want this information to be available and sort of different third parties have access to it. So, if you're going to be a third party and you're going to develop a business model around that, that's going to span utility territories, you need the information to be in some sort of standard format?
Michael Murray
Correct.
David Roberts
Is it currently in any kind of standard format or is this the case where every utility has bespoke formats and data storage?
Michael Murray
Unfortunately, it's more like the latter. So, we have 3000 retail electric utilities. Let's put Texas aside for a moment because they're a little bit different. But most utilities have their own way of doing things. There have been some efforts to develop standards for downloading customer data, which, you know, as we discussed, is not that helpful because there's friction and you can't do it every day or every hour of every day. And that's using the Green Button standard for downloading information. But if you actually look at a lot of these Green Button files that utilities claim follow the standard, they actually don't.
David Roberts
Tell us quickly what the Green Button standard is.
Michael Murray
The Green Button was started, I think, by the Department of Energy and NIST in maybe 2010. So, this was early Obama years and with a very noble aim, which was to sort of solve this interoperability problem that we're talking about. And there were two flavors of it. So, Green Button Download My Data where you have to manually go in and download the file yourself. And then there's Connect My Data, which is the API. So, this is the automated interface, which is really what you need for most applications. And Green Button Download My Data was adopted by a number of utilities, but again, the actual compliance percentage is probably not as high as you might think.
David Roberts
Is it mandatory or is there any legal force behind it or is it a voluntary thing?
Michael Murray
No. And again, I like and respect some of the Obama administration's Department of Energy officials in this respect, but I think they really missed this opportunity to hold the utility's feet to the fire. And so, there was a voluntary effort to get adoption. And as you might expect, there just wasn't that much follow through. And on Green Button Connect, that was very stark. So, there was no utility that voluntarily adopted Green Button Connect My Data. Zero. So, every single one was one that I had to, with my organization, go state by state and get a regulatory order forcing them to do it.
David Roberts
Oh, jeez. So, are there now utilities doing this? Well, open up their meters to an API so a third party can connect and monitor the information in real time. Is that happening in some places?
Michael Murray
Yes, and so we just released an online map, which we can talk about a little bit, called the Green Button Explorer. The idea behind this is to try to show what data is actually available in different utilities, because again, that's a massive patchwork across the whole country. If you're trying to build a business that you know exists outside of one utility territory, this is really, really essential information that you need to have. And so, we try to take some of the arrows on our back to do the discovery and the homework on exactly what information you can get from each of these utilities.
So, I'll give you a couple of examples of ones that are working really well. One is National Grid in New York. They are using UtilityAPI, which is a software vendor, and they have a lot of companies, I think it's 55 or so, third parties offering energy management services who are registered and using that system. There are some other ones. The California investor-owned utilities were required about eleven years ago to do this as well. If you're familiar with Renew Home, they're the formerly OhmConnect. This is one of the largest virtual power plants in the world. They have been one of the largest users of the Green Button Connect platforms in PG&E, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas and Electric's territory.
David Roberts
But these are islands, basically islands of good practice amidst a sea of bad practice, which makes it difficult to build a substantial business around it. So tell us, just to make the connection clear to listeners, why this matters. Like why, why is this so connected to the distributed energy kind of movement? Like why is this information so crucial to distributed energy? And conversely, sort of like, why is hiding this information or making it inaccessible standing in the way of the spread of distributed energy?
Michael Murray
So, the key is this information from the meter is how you get paid to deliver a distributed energy service. So, in a grid of the future, where there's bi-directional flows, there's virtual power plants, there's aggregations of services, whether for energy or capacity, or maybe even ancillary services at the wholesale level. The way that you measure that is by what happened on the meter. Let's say you used 2500 watts of power and then you got a text message to reduce your usage. Or maybe your battery started discharging and it dropped by a kilowatt to 1500 watts.
Well, that thousand-watt difference is reflected in the meter, and that's the basis of potential compensation. And so, by hiding the ball, by making it difficult to access this information, you're really undermining the participation of lots of different companies and devices.
David Roberts
Well, do you make it, I mean, is it as clear as saying it's just impossible to participate in something like a virtual power plant if you don't have a meter that's open and frequent? So basically, you can't do DERs at scale without this. Is that fair to say?
Michael Murray
That is. And the original demand response development was for large commercial industrial customers 20 some odd years ago. Actually, EnerNOC, one of the first commercial industrial demand response pioneers, was giving presentations around the country saying that it cost about $6,000 a pop to install their own metering equipment and their own communication network. Usually, it was a cellular modem so that real-time usage information could be sent back to their network operations center. If you're talking about curtailing a large, let's say, Dreyer's ice cream, which has warehouses of refrigeration or an aluminum smelter, or megawatts and megawatts of power, well, $6,000 doesn't really bother you that much.
But when you're talking about homes and these micro-transactions, which can be really significant, it's just a non-starter. And so, we've seen a lot more. I think utilities are much more protective of their residential customer data. They're more willing to, you know, because they understand the commercial businesses are actively buying, you know, a lot of demand response services. There's more, you know, more acceptance of that. But at the residential level, yeah, if you don't have this information or you can't access it, then, yeah, there's no way you're going to get paid in the wholesale markets.
David Roberts
Let me ask this then. Like, theoretically, could a company come in and install its own metering equipment in my house and do this stuff? It's just cost in the way of that, right?
Michael Murray
Cost and time. And so, I can, you know, I spent the first ten years of my career installing sub-meters throughout commercial buildings. And so, I'm you know, nobody knows the pain of sub-metering more than I do. I've installed, you know, more than I can count. And, you know, there's all sorts of issues that come up. It's not impossible, but, you know, some buildings and some code inspectors will require you to shut down the entire building in order to get the meter properly installed. So that's a huge disruption. Other times, it's very difficult to measure the total load.
That's very similar to what the electric meter actually measures just because of, you know, busing and, you know, large sort of service entrances on some buildings. So, you can do it. It's just, it's going to cost you $300-$400 in equipment, plus maybe an electrician, depending on what your risk tolerance is for doing this sort of thing yourself.
David Roberts
So, technologically, like my house, I could, if I really was insanely devoted to it, install my own sort of private metering technology and get this information for myself if I were willing to spend all that time and money.
Michael Murray
That's right, but, and this is where you would come against one of the first obstacles to a larger, mass market participation. If you took your home-installed meter data and you said, "I delivered this service to the grid, I want to get paid," the very first thing they're going to say is, "But David, we don't trust your meter. You could have done it fraudulently in such a way that you're not measuring the true information. And so, we're the regulated utility. And as the only legitimate source of truth on this topic, we should therefore discount any type of device-level metering or customer-installed meters."
Now, that's been the argument, and that's one of the reasons why, you know, Mission:data exists, because installing 165 million sub-meters, if that's the gating factor to decarbonizing the power grid. We have a, we have a big problem, right?
David Roberts
So practically speaking, utilities have to do this.
Michael Murray
That's right. And, you know, there's a bit of an asterisk here. There are some wholesale markets like PJM where you can do some of your own device-level metering as long as it passes some accuracy standards and so forth. So there are exceptions to that. But for the mass market, the utility is really the only game in town. It's part of their monopoly. And so, therefore, our view as a nonprofit, as advocates, is that as stewards of public resources, whether they're private or public, the utility really has an obligation to make this information more accessible.
David Roberts
Smart meters themselves have gotten better. Yes, I mean, presumably, this is a technology that's been around for a couple of decades now. I'm assuming that AMI is what, advanced metering infrastructure? AMI is the sort of term for smart meters generally. There's this whole thing now of AMI 2.0. So, you hear a lot of utilities going, "Yes, the whole initial smart metering thing was a useless fiasco, but now we have even better meters." What is the sort of the promise of AMI 2.0? And like, who's behind that?
Michael Murray
Yeah. So, in many respects, the promises of 2.0 are the unfulfilled promises of 1.0. So, I can be cynical, but I'm actually pretty excited about 2.0, and I'll tell you why. So, I mentioned Zigbee with AMI 1.0. So, this is basically a read-only interface. It's like Bluetooth, so it uses 2.4 GHz wireless, that WiFi and other things use. And it was not hugely successful, mostly because people don't have Zigbee devices. It's just not a very common thing. There will be some smart home nerds who are listeners who are like, "Oh, but I've been using a Z-Wave system since 1999," and there are those people, but in general, it's just not that popular.
The new smart meters version 2.0, you might say, has Wi-Fi on board. And the major meter manufacturers in North America have, I would say, largely standardized around a certain application sort of protocol over Wi-Fi that's called IEEE 2030.5. And you might know that as a smart inverter standard. California and other states require that for communicating with inverters, so it's possible to send real-time, meaning once a second, usage data, over Wi-Fi. And of course, people have Wi-Fi devices in their homes. I think we're at 90 something percent broadband penetration, which is great. And so there is the potential for a much greater participation rates with Wi-Fi.
David Roberts
But only if the information is accessible, right? Like, it doesn't matter if the utility has a bunch more information if it's not doing anything with it and it's not letting other people have it.
Michael Murray
Exactly. And this is my biggest frustration. There are still today, utility regulators who have bought the utilities line that, "Oh, this is foundational infrastructure. We shouldn't talk about how customers can use the data because it would be premature to do so. You need to pay us for advanced meters first, and then we can have a subsequent discussion about how customers might use that information." And that has just ended poorly in so many cases with, you know, stonewalling and the utility says to the regulator, "Oh, well, now that you want to provide customer access to this information, well, that's going to cost tens of millions of dollars, and so therefore we shouldn't do it."
You know, our biggest argument for the regulators listening is, you have to attach the terms and conditions, and the requirements, the stipulations, at the time the investment is made. Otherwise, you know, you're just not likely to have a positive outcome.
David Roberts
Yeah, they're just going to move the goalposts, right? Because ultimately, they don't want to do any of this stuff. So, are there now utilities that have installed a bunch of AMI 2.0 fancy pants meters on their territories?
Michael Murray
There are a few. It's just getting started. Parts of upstate New York will be getting them. Massachusetts will get them. Xcel Energy has been deploying them throughout their seven-state territory. These meters also have a computer on them, as well as the Wi-Fi capabilities.
David Roberts
I want to talk about that. So, part of the promise of AMI 2.0 is we're putting more computing in the device itself. So then, we're going to have all this computing power out on the edge of the grid and we're going to be able to do all this cool stuff with it. This is the kind of promise of AMI 2.0; they're like little computers. But then, the counter-argument is computers' capability, communication capability, the kinds of information we want and can use, the kinds of information we can get, all that stuff is evolving, is rapidly evolving.
And so, if you build it into the hardware of the meter, you're just going to end up having to, like, by the time you install a million of these meters, technology will have advanced and the information will have, everything will have advanced to the point that your meters, your hardware meters are out of date and then you're right back installing new ones. So, I think that the sort of pushback against AMI 2.0 is just if you're putting the computing in the meter, you're going to get stuck in a cycle where you're constantly replacing and upgrading the meter. And of course, the way we get around this in other contexts is you sort of make the device itself dumb and you do the computing, the smart part, in the cloud, and that way the cloud can constantly be updating its capabilities and all you need from the device itself is dumb information. This is probably the subject of a pod in itself.
But like, what's your take on that? Like, eventually, it seems like trying to make meters more and more complicated computers just, to me intuitively, is like that's going to run aground of the wild advances in computers. Is there an alternative on the table? Because even just getting the information we need for the DER stuff, like all that's going to get a lot more sophisticated too. And if we're waiting on hardware upgrades at every step of that, it's just going to slow the whole thing down. So, I don't know, I talked way too long.
Tell me what you think.
Michael Murray
You're right. So, those are certainly some concerns. Keep in mind, the average lifespan of a smart meter, let's call it a 1.0 smart meter, is about 15 years, maybe 20 years. And so, it's right to be concerned, you know, are we locking ourselves in for potentially 20 years? The next 20 years are going to be really important for climate.
David Roberts
A lot's going to go on.
Michael Murray
That's right. That's right. So, but I think some of those concerns can be addressed in a couple of different ways. The first one is, one way that you avoid some of the challenges of obsolescence is by having software updates, over the air, software updates to the meter. So if you have a good enough network where information can be sent down and an app can be updated, then it's not the end of the world. It doesn't all have to be in the cloud. The argument for distributed computing is that if you're talking about measuring voltage levels and power flows potentially thousands or millions of times per second to infer certain things about what's happening with the power grid, there simply isn't enough bandwidth on these networks to send that information to the cloud in the first place.
David Roberts
Right.
Michael Murray
And so, you're trying to suck a lot of data through a very small straw, and that could be just difficult to work with. So, I think there is a role for computing there. I think we shouldn't spend an insane amount of money on it. But if you can find the right balance of a well-equipped processor that can grow in time with some of the advances that we're talking about, that coupled with some over-the-air software update capability, that actually sounds pretty reasonable to me. Some of the manufacturers of meters are saying that these AMI 2.0 meters have essentially reached cost parity with 1.0 meters.
David Roberts
Oh, really?
Michael Murray
So, there maybe isn't that much of a cost premium to get these. Again, I think we still have some concerns about vendor lock-in over this 20-year period, but that's not an issue of physics, that's an issue of contracts.
David Roberts
Right. Well, then you're back to the sort of issue of like, standardized data formats, standardized communication protocols, all this kind of stuff. And I want to get back to that. But one issue I want to touch on before I forget, whenever you talk smart grid anything, this is the first question you get. I'm sure you've gotten it many millions of times, but like, people more or less trust their utilities.
Michael Murray
They may not like them, but they trust them.
David Roberts
Yeah, they don't like them, but they sort of like they're a fact of life. But I think when people think like, "Oh, this information is going to be packaged, and then the consumer can just give third parties access to it willy nilly. What about privacy concerns? What about the concerns of like, scams?" You know, like an elderly resident gets tricked into giving her information. Like, as I was thinking about it, I was like, "Well, what could you really do with this information in terms of scams?" Like, is how much electricity someone is using really that, you know, potent of a fact about them?
Like, what could you do with it? I don't know, but let's talk about security and privacy concerns.
Michael Murray
Yeah. So, those have been ever since this, the first public utility commission case I was involved with in, you know, 2012. These issues came up and it's often, I think, a pretext for the anti-competitive impulses which sort of underlie all of this. But, you know, let's, let's just take it on its own merits for the time being. So, with privacy, there are some really good privacy frameworks that have been adopted. California is really quite good. There are other states that have done something similar.
David Roberts
Is this one of those things where the EU is way ahead in both the technology and the standards? It just feels like that kind of thing to me.
Michael Murray
I think so, yes and no. But a lot of the core principles that are underlying GDPR, for example, were reflected in the 2011 privacy ruling in California and have since been copied by, you know, many other red states and blue states. And it's basically that, you know, some core principles are the customer gets to decide, right? The customer has the right to access the information about themselves that's held by this large corporation. You have the right to make changes. If anything's incorrect, you have the right to, you know, get the information out of them. When it's, when you are the account holder, the problems come in when there's someone else who isn't authorized to have access.
And at a high level, it's like, "Well, that's just the utility's responsibility to prevent unauthorized access."
David Roberts
In some sense, once you have Wi-Fi, you have an attack surface. There's no way around that, right?
Michael Murray
Well, that's right. And so, I always find it funny when utilities talk about this attack surface that's like, well, I mean, I'd be happy to get rid of my cell phone and not have smart meters at all and just, you know, we could go back to that life. But we've made a business decision, right? We've decided that this is what we're going to do. Right?
David Roberts
This is a solved problem.
Michael Murray
Yeah, it's manageable.
David Roberts
Although, I think people are a little bit, have elevated sort of risk sensitivity when you are talking about something that's sort of so close to, you know, hearth and home, real physical security type concerns.
Michael Murray
Yes. And so in that department, let's separate two issues. One is unauthorized scammers or marketers getting access to that information. And then the second is law enforcement. And I have said from the very beginning, if you're in law enforcement and you want access to someone's meter data, then get a warrant from a judge. That's the proper way to do it. There's Fourth Amendment protections that are especially strong in the home.
David Roberts
What's the, what else would you like? Is there talk about law enforcement having free access to this data?
Michael Murray
Yes, it's certainly happened. There's been all sorts of issues. The Edward Snowden story, eleven years ago, or whenever that was, sort of broke open this idea with social media companies. But if you look at some of the case law, there have been instances in which federal agencies have used what are called administrative warrants, where they go to a utility and say, "We think there's criminal activity here, give us access to this information." You may have heard about this in the case of marijuana growing.
David Roberts
Yeah, I was trying to think of, like, why would law enforcement want this information? That's kind of the one case I could think of. Like, if you have a big grow operation or something.
Michael Murray
Right. And, you know, it's been a while since I looked into this in detail, but there were some cases of basically an administrative subpoena. That's code for, "We didn't go to a judge." It's just a request. And, you know, when you get a request from a three-letter agency, you know, you don't want to say no. And so there have been cases where information has been provided there. So there was actually, interestingly, I think, a class action brought against Sacramento Municipal Utility District about sort of selective law enforcement where they had allegedly had access to meter data and then would target Asian American communities for some sort of illegal behavior.
David Roberts
Jesus.
Michael Murray
I don't want to say it's nothing, you know, again, they should just get a warrant from a judge, and then I think people would accept it. But having some sort of pipeline —
David Roberts
I say, "Amen." But I also say, just given the way things seem to go in this country, I'm skeptical about us winning that battle.
Michael Murray
It's possible, you know. I'm sort of a civil libertarian in that respect. I, you know, I'm concerned with it. I think that's, you know, we should be concerned with it. As for the commercial misuse, that has yet to ever be an issue.
David Roberts
Yeah, I'm sort of like wondering, what could it be? Even conceivably, like, what if, like, if I tricked you into giving me this information about your house, what could I do with it? Shenanigan-wise.
Michael Murray
The funniest use case I hear of is, "Well, I could tell whether David is home or not." And it's like, "Well, I could also drive by our house and see if the lights are on." Like, there are other ways of getting that information.
David Roberts
Or track my phone. Everybody knows where I am all the time now anyway, right?
Michael Murray
So, it seems like an unlikely threat vector, I would say, that you're going to use it for burglary purposes. Honestly, I think it would be more common for sales and marketing. So, we have heard of, I don't know the details, but something like someone shared their energy usage history with, let's say, Company A, and then they hear from Company B and C that want to sell them solar or something else based on their profile. So, it's possible, but the instances of that happening are so rare that it's not worth talking about, but we have existing state laws and even federal law on deceptive business practices.
State attorneys general deal with these types of issues all the time in other sectors, so it's not really an issue. Here's just a quick story on how this issue manifested itself the first time when I was paying attention to it. The California utilities in 2012 were concerned about this and I sort of started probing them more, like, "But if the customer is providing their consent to have their information shared, then what exactly is the harm here? And it's your job as the utility to make sure an imposter doesn't come and ask for the information. So that's on you."
And they said, "Well, really, what we're concerned about is reputational damage. We're concerned about some third party who's a bad actor that shares the information they weren't supposed to. It ends up in the LA Times and we look bad."
David Roberts
Yeah, okay. I mean, this is, let's just keep in mind this is all weighed against the extraordinary benefits of a robust DER ecosystem. Right? Like, this is not an academic discussion.
Michael Murray
Like, well, that's right.
David Roberts
The idea that we should close off that entire development out of these really weird, abstract, and unlikely security concerns is just — that sounds like a pretext to me.
Michael Murray
Exactly. And you know, I would love to try to explain to our grandchildren that we couldn't solve climate change because we were worried about utilities' reputations who, by the way, are monopolies and they suffer no business loss as a result of having a bad reputation.
David Roberts
I know, I know. What do you even care? Like, what do you even care what your reputation is? Not like anybody can leave. Not like anybody can get out. That's hilarious.
Michael Murray
Exactly. So again, all of these issues can be addressed. I think the underlying impulse is one that regulators really need to face, which is these organizations often do not want to do the right thing. And so the question is how to compel them.
David Roberts
Like any regulatory agency, should go into these negotiations with that as their baseline. These utilities don't want to do this. And so, they're almost certainly going to bull us about this.
Michael Murray
Yes, and I would say that applies to the US Department of Energy as well, with the grant program that they got another $3 billion for. And in my view, they haven't really learned the lesson from the, you know, intransigence of the utilities the first time.
David Roberts
Well, let's talk about that in the brief time we have left. Let's talk about what to do about this. So, your big recommendation is when the administration hands out these grants, SGIG, Smart Grid something something —
Michael Murray
Innovation grants.
David Roberts
innovation grants, which were born with ARRA, were born back in the Obama age, but that program is still around and still getting funded.
Michael Murray
That's right. So the IIJA infrastructure bill put another $3 billion into the program.
David Roberts
So, your bid, your main policy recommendation, is that the DOE should attach conditions to these grants. Basically, if you want this money to install smart meters, you have to promise to make the data available in a standardized format. Basically, that's your big recommendation.
Michael Murray
Correct. And I was pleased that originally the Department of Energy agreed with us and they put a requirement for data standards and interoperability into the first round of grants. What was really disappointing is that they then walked it all back and they said, "Actually, we encourage utilities to do so. We don't actually require it." And it's sort of only gone downhill from there. You know, I can't speak to why that decision was made, but it's really a loss. I ran the numbers on the first tranche of awards. There's, I think, 40 some odd utilities that they represent 36 million households and businesses across the country.
And so, with the stroke of a pen, this is just the first $1 billion out of the $3 billion. DOE could really make a meaningful difference here for data portability.
David Roberts
So, they still could, that story's not over. Like, DOE could still get a clue on this and —
Michael Murray
Correct. They could do it. And I've tried to point out that, you know, we do similar things with highway funding.
David Roberts
Tons of conditions on highway funding. That's like a major, that's a major policy lever over the states.
Michael Murray
That's right. That's a big one. States also have rules governing broadband funding. So it's a little bit like net neutrality where, you know, you would never let, you know if Comcast and NBCUniversal and so on, you would never let them, you know, sort of self preference with their own solutions using the pipes that they have received, you know, taxpayer money for. And similarly, we do the same thing with healthcare data now. So you can actually be fined as a hospital and you can have your Medicare reimbursements denied if you are found to have blocked the exchange of patient data at the patient's request.
David Roberts
And that's also in a standardized format. Right. Like, that's the same set of concerns over on that side.
Michael Murray
That's right. And they've made some really excellent strides in the last five years. A lot of this is under the radar in the healthcare space, making more APIs available. It can be done securely. We're talking about literally some of the most sensitive information about you, and it can absolutely be done. We see this done in the banking sector. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a rulemaking open right now that would penalize banks for refusing to share your transaction history or loan information with another financial institution at your request. And so the whole idea behind this is when there's federal oversight involved, we want customers to have choices.
We want, you know, that just comes with the territory. And my argument is, if the utilities aren't prepared to provide this information on a sort of open, non-discriminatory basis, then they shouldn't be eligible to receive any money.
David Roberts
I mean, it's so obvious. It's such an obvious analogous case. You know, like we do this for health care information, we do this for banking information. It's just very obvious we ought to be doing this for electricity information too. It's just, once again, like utilities with a public grant of monopoly, lobbying for their own interests against the public interest, lots of times using ratepayer money to do so, just to put a cherry on top of the whole thing.
Michael Murray
That's right.
David Roberts
So final question then, like if DOE doesn't get a clue and attach conditions to these grants, what's plan B here? Is there a backup sort of policy? You know, like, what else could you do policy wise? Is this like state PUCs seem like theoretically could tell their state's utilities to do this, yeah?
Michael Murray
Yes, absolutely. They, you know, should have done that ten years ago. But, you know, hey, better late than never. So we'll take it. There are a lot of states that have been sitting on different rulemakings for a long time. Maryland has been sitting on a rulemaking since 2016. The Maryland Public Service Commission has not ruled on it. They've just never finalized any of the rules.
About data, about data sharing specifically?
That's right.
David Roberts
Eight years. That seems like enough time to really study, study that top to bottom.
Michael Murray
Yep. There are other states where, you know, in different stages of maturity, I would say. And this isn't, you know, totally a bad news story there. I'm working on a really exciting initiative in New England, which would be a multi-utility, multi-state effort to provide essentially one API for customer energy data across the whole region.
David Roberts
And who's pushing, like, who's behind that? What's the sort of entity?
Michael Murray
So, it's been done actually somewhat collaboratively. It started in New Hampshire with some enabling legislation. So, there's a settlement agreement from a few years ago with the New Hampshire commission that outlines the design of this platform. There are three electric and gas utilities in New Hampshire. And so, if you're trying to get data from across the state or you're a multi-site customer, it's a major pain to go to each one individually. This would solve that problem. And we've engaged with the utilities in neighboring states, and there's actually a grant application from the utilities into the Department of Energy to expand that regionally.
David Roberts
So, that's the kind of thing that could spread, right? Like, other utilities could just hop on board of this existing train that's moving. How a lot of good policy ends up happening is sort of starting at a pool of states and spreading. You can cite a bunch of examples, fuel economy standards, et cetera.
Michael Murray
That's right. But there is one other federal policy lever that is worth exploring, and that is using antitrust law.
David Roberts
Against entities to whom you have granted a monopoly.
Michael Murray
Correct, correct. And most of the utilities, they have had fairly broad immunity from antitrust claims for the obvious reason that they're created by state governments and specifically intended as monopolies. But that immunity is not infinite. And there are some cases where blocking an anti-competitive activity is subject to antitrust liability when that activity is not being actively supervised by the state.
David Roberts
Interesting.
Michael Murray
And so, in other words, if there's a tentacle of the monopoly that sort of goes outside of its quarantined area and starts causing meddling in other adjacent areas, I think there is a federal role for that. I think a lot of federal antitrust hasn't looked at those issues with monopoly utilities in the last few years.
David Roberts
It's so sticky, right? Because part of the big argument now, part of the general angst and uncertainty, is where do those tentacles end? Like, where is the proper edge of the monopoly? This is like the whole distributed energy fight is kind of about that.
Michael Murray
That's right. And if you've read the Federal Power Act, you read about this sort of antiquated distinction between retail and wholesale, and that increasingly no longer makes sense. So, we're going to get scrambled here in many of our foundational legal concepts. But with data portability, I think it's... I'll give you an example of why I think antitrust law will have something to say here, and that is that some utilities are not providing information that is expressly necessary for demand-side resources to participate in wholesale markets. And so, a few examples are in MISO in the Midwest, they require PII, so personally identifiable information that is sent to MISO for registration and settlement of these resources.
And this includes the customer address, the customer name, customer email address, and so on. And so when a lot of utilities say, "Well, we can't provide that information because it's sensitive or there are privacy concerns," they're actually expressly denying the information that you need to get paid in that market. There are some other examples in PJM where your peak load contribution, this is an annual value that's calculated by your distribution utility that has to go to the wholesale market in order to be compensated. And if that information is not available, you basically get kicked to the curb.
So, there are lots of examples of that where there are some utilities now that we have a track record in some states like California. I talked about National Grid in New York, there's a few others. The Texas system has done pretty well in this area. Now that a lot of those privacy concerns have been addressed, I think it's no longer acceptable to say, "Well, we don't have to provide this information because there'd be a cybersecurity vulnerability." It starts to look more like discrimination, frankly.
David Roberts
Right. Are there legal cases around this happening in the courts?
Michael Murray
In other areas, there are. There are none that I'm aware of with utilities directly. You may actually recall in the late nineties, the antitrust case against Microsoft. They were found guilty by — a lot of people forget this — the district court found them guilty of being a monopolist. And one of the remedies was for Microsoft to open up more data about the operating system so that you could have a level playing field between different app makers.
David Roberts
Right.
Michael Murray
And so, the idea was to sort of separate the, you know, some of the dominance with, you know, Microsoft Office and the productivity suite from the operating system itself.
David Roberts
Right. You can't use dominance here to establish dominance there. Basically, that is the core of the antitrust and that seems exactly like what utilities are doing.
Michael Murray
That's right. And Bush got elected and his Department of Justice dropped the case and so on appeal. So, you know, it was redounded to Microsoft's benefit. But the underlying concept is not dissimilar. And keep in mind, even in the eighties and the nineties, at least theoretically, you had a choice about which operating system you wanted on your computer, but no one has a choice about their electric meter and their distribution utility.
David Roberts
Well, luckily, we have a really smart and reasonable Supreme Court ready to share wisdom on this subject. Well, this is all fascinating. Anything else to add in terms of next steps? Is there a proximate battle happening?
Michael Murray
Well, I'll point your listeners to a map that we've released called the Green Button Explorer. And you can find that, maybe, in the show notes: explorer.missiondata.io. That's our attempt at putting together a nationwide inventory of what data you can get from utilities and what data each of the wholesale markets actually require for participation. And so, if you see there may be areas where, you know, local listeners, you know, want to be active, they want to reach out to us, get information about how they can make a difference that is really meaningful.
David Roberts
Would you write your legislator? Would you go to a PUC meeting? Would you go try to pressure your PUC? Like what can a person do?
Michael Murray
Yes, I think all of those things. And there are two approaches. You can either get a legal obligation on the utilities to provide this information, or you can go to the ISO and RTO and have them drop the requirement in the first place. Some of the requirements are peculiar to certain RTOs, you know, like line losses in PJM. You have to have this piece of information that I don't think any of the other RTOs require. So, can't we just get rid of it? Isn't there some way to drop that? Or you can get all the utilities to have this obligation.
So, the average person, I think, unfortunately, it's hard to make a difference just as one person. But there's an ecosystem of companies that want to provide services in this area, right? Like, especially with the IRA money on electrification and heat pumps. And, "Do you need an electrical panel upgrade? Well, let's look at your smart meter data and see if we can, you know, avoid that $10,000 upgrade to a, you know, 400 amp service" or something like that. So there's a lot of different uses for it. And I would encourage people to, you know, think about the services that they want and try to articulate, you know, those data needs to legislators and to regulators. Mission:data exists to try to help fill this void. So if there's other companies that are interested in joining us and supporting our work, they can also reach out to me directly.
David Roberts
Yeah, this seems like a good note to end on, which is just to say that this is not just anybody who's been listening knows this, but just to reinforce this is not just some sort of arcane privacy or data access thing. This is the distributed energy ecosystem that we all envision for the future is not possible without this kind of shared information. So, this is a big deal. This is a stopper on top of a lot of other good things. So, it's worth everybody tuning into. All right, well, thank you so much.
Michael Murray
Thank you.
David Roberts
Really interesting. I've been wondering about this smart meter stuff for so long, so it's great to get some illumination in here. So, thank you.
Michael Murray
It's my pleasure. Thank you so much.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes my guests and I sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or leaving a nice review or telling a friend about Volts, or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
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