Byte back?

Suppliers who think customers will be satisfied with accurate bills from smart metering are in for a shock, AlertMe's Mary Turner tells Janet Wood.

Mary Turner is chief executive of AlertMe, a company that aims to harness the power of smart meters to manage people’s homes. In the past, she has worked with a raft of household names in the digital and mobile sector that have been sold and absorbed. Turner has worked with Compuserve, before and after it became part of Aol, and with BT’s LineOne ISP. She was chief executive of Tiscali, launching its digital TV as part of a triple-play customer package, and sold Tiscali UK to Carphone Warehouse in 2009.

Compare that series of companies with stable, long-lived utilities. But the series of takeovers and sales is not a tale of failure, but the sign of an industry in fast-forward evolution.

That may be an unnerving prospect for utility professionals, but if Turner is right, smart meters could mean traditional utilities fade into the background as new service companies take over in just the same way.

She is scathing about the way that some traditional energy companies talk about the opportunities of smart metering. One told a conference recently that having the ability to bill customers using actual readings would be seen as “innovative” by customers. Turner says it won’t.

“Timely billing – that’s just half a step forward,” she says. What about providing more information to users? “Visualisation and understanding the bill? That’s another half step,” she says. In practice, she thinks accurate and informative billing is the least customers should expect. “Customers will say: ‘now you have caught up with other sectors’,” she says, and will want much more.

AlertMe thinks that will mean customers saying “help me manage my life” and Turner puts herself forward as an example. Her system tells her when her young son arrives at the front door, and if she is away she can tell whether he is at his computer or watching the TV. Other users may want to adjust their heating while they are out of the house.

“It’s about comfort, convenience and cost. In the first stage we give you the control. In the second we help you automate to fit your lifestyle,” Turner says. She adds: “We already have most of that intelligence. But we must learn not to talk about technology.

The [smart meter] language is too native, it’s not customer-friendly.”

For an engineering-based industry like energy, chan­ging the mindset is hard to do, but Turner says that’s a learning curve the communications industry went through too. “First we used to talk about data speeds and data storage, megabytes, bits and download speed. Do you remember the jump from 56k modems?

“Then we started talking about Broadband Britain. That started to mean different things to different people – for some people it’s communications, for some it’s entertainment, for some it’s about cost saving.”

Turner believes the energy industry will follow a similar path. “Now we are in phase zero, before launch, still talking about nuts and bolts,” she says. But in future the industry shouldn’t talk about smart meters and smart grids – that’s not customer language. “Why would you talk about ‘load balancing’?” she asks, adding “that’s really about special offers for customers that lead their behaviour [such as incentivise them to reduce consumption]”.

Turner is keen that the smart meter industry should not get held up in the pre-launch phase zero for too long. “There is a tendency to aim for perfection and look for future-proof solutions, but there is no such thing. It needs evolution,” she says. “When it’s ‘good enough’ you need to get it out there, get consumer pull and start being customer-led. Stop asking whether this is the right time.”

Aside from accurate bills, in conjunction with smart appliances and new developments in the grid, smart meters will give consumers control – partly directly, such as enabling them to adjust temperature controls remotely; and partly indirectly, by ceding some control, perhaps to an energy company that uses flexible appliances to help manage the grid.

That’s a lot of control, and it needs management. Even at its most basic level, Turner says: “Customers don’t want ten different interfaces, one for each appliance – look how annoying it is to have two TV remotes.” AlertMe is an online aggregation platform service for that management, providing an interface and interconnecting to provide consistent controls. Turner says: “It’s not just appliances. It could be sensors, door locks, alarms or whatever.”

She is keen that the in-home displays that will be rolled out with new meters should be just one of a number of choices. She says visualisation should be mandatory, “but it can be as a smartphone or web interface, where you can manage your system and send alerts” – and that is likely to develop in unexpected ways as early adopters start to experiment (see box).

Back to the experience of telecoms – and another startling message for energy companies used to providing services for all: “Don’t be afraid of re-invention, don’t think the customer has to understand, don’t bother future proofing. Don’t have a vanilla offering for everyone.”

Turner says 10 per cent of the users will be “way ahead”, and they will drive the development. And although there will be a few people who are slow to catch up, most people will make use of the services developed by early adopters. Text messaging and smart phones provide the perfect examples of how technology can take off and change people’s lives.

Early adopters lead the way

AlertMe early adopters who are exploring how to use their systems are writing their own applications:

· using AlertMe to monitor the energy being used when the user works from home

· using the AlertMe button as a doorbell which automatically activates a camera to record who comes to the door or switch on a light or radio

· configuring settings so when the family cat sets off a motion sensor, the system turns a light on

· automating the kettle to come on at a particular time each morning

· discovering that an ice maker was costing more than £300 a year to run

· writing an app to check for status reports on the Piccadilly Line – a SmartLamp glows red for severe delays through to green for normal service.

This article first appeared in Utility Week’s print edition of 4 May 2012.
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