Pathway to Power Graphic via Oncor
The smart grid, a digital technology that gives consumers and electric companies detailed consumption data, is undergoing widespread deployment in much of Texas.
Oncor, the largest electric distribution and transmission service in the state, has been replacing mechanical meters with digital smart meters since 2008, with plans to deploy more than 3 million by 2012.
The technology will forever alter how consumers receive and learn about their electricity. Where before consumers received a bill at the end of the month, smart meters will allow consumers to monitor their consumption in real-time, according to Megan Wright, spokeswoman for Oncor.
“Advanced metering is like putting a speedometer on your electric bill,” Wright said. In a house with a smart meter interacting with the smart grid, a consumer could turn on a blender, for example, and use in-home monitors to see immediately how their energy consumption increases.
Aside from savings which arise through better-educated consumption, consumers could elect to operate certain appliances away from peak hours, meaning electric companies would bill them less. In addition, the smart grid gives electric service providers faster response times when repairing damages on the grid.
“The smart grid enables Oncor to find and pinpoint problems on the grid before anyone calls and reports them,” Wright said. “So if there’s an outage, we’ll have a much faster response time.”
But the smart grid has been subject to controversy, especially because of the detailed consumer information it collects and pushes back to service providers.
Roy Hadley, an attorney with the Atlanta law office of Barnes & Thornburg and co-leader of the cloud computing and cyber-security practice team, said the technology will give electric service providers granular information on consumers, data that electric companies have never dealt with before.
“This data could potentially be a marketing gold mine,” Hadley said.
As smart meters become more in-tune with consumers and their usage habits, and as they gain the ability to interact with appliances within the house, information in greater detail will travel back over the smart grid infrastructure to the power companies.
“Eventually you do have the ability as a power company to really talk about and capture my usage,” Hadley said. “So all of a sudden, they know when I’m home and not home. Do I really want them to know that?”
The scenario becomes similar to the online marketing information economy, where Web sites and applications gather consumer data and sell it en masse to marketing companies.
Say, for example, your power company was able to observe in its data that every first week of July you leave your house, Hadley explained. Year after year, your power usage suddenly declines for a week. Your power company could then take that data, assume you were going on vacation, and sell it to travel companies that are interested in targeting potential vacationers with ads.
“The power companies collect this information, and the question becomes: whose information is it?” Hadley said. “Is it their information to sell? Is it their information to protect?”
Whenever detailed information is collected in cyberspace, the question of security is usually soon to follow. A recent survey from Ponemon Research found that 90 percent of U.S. businesses were victims of hacking in the past 12 months. With all that data going into the smart grid, data that reveals intimate information about when a person is home, the specter of hackers using their skills to burglarize homes emerges.
“If I’m a burglar, for example, all I’ve got to do is hack into the smart grid, and I know when you’re home and when you’re not home,” Hadley said.
Despite these concerns, Hadley said the technology and the types of information collected are so new that there is no federal legislation to protect consumers. What happens to consumers’ data when it goes into the smart grid is left to the discretion of individual companies, or else to individual states.
According to Wright, Oncor, which distributes electricity to about 400 cities in Texas, has no plans to sell consumers’ information for marketing purposes. In addition, Texas law stipulates that all utility data belongs to the consumers, and it therefore prohibits a company like Oncor from using that data for purposes other than billing, according to Wright.
Wright added that Oncor uses a fully encrypted security system, so any information accessed by hackers would have to be decoded.
“The information is very safe and secure–it’s fully encrypted,” she said. “It’s impossible to design an impenetrable security system, but we have a multi-layered approach that’s overseen by several offices.”
Oncor has a full-time security team that is constantly monitoring and addressing each security alert, according to Wright. If there are irregularities, the team investigates them. If a problem were to arise, the team would take measures to lock it out of the system.
Oncor has teamed up with CenterPoint Energy to start the Biggest Energy Saver Campaign, a contest that is part of the Obama Administration’s push to educate citizens about the smart grid. The event centers around two contests: an app developers contest, which encourages developers to create consumer-facing smart grid apps; and a customer contest, which will reward customers who use smart meters to reduce their energy consumption.
For details on the competitions and the prizes visit the site here.
