California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE)

The reason for giving a talk about utility/customer communication, computing, and control at this conference on new service opportunities for electricutilities lies in the nature of the services being considered. Essentially, these services involve the provision of information about the value ofattributes of electricity supply (e.g., the value of reliability, security, ortime-of-use). In order for the provision of this information to be a service, itmust be communicated to customers in a timely fashion, the customers mustbe able to decide what to do about the information (computing), and they must do it (control). Also, to settle accounts, it will be necessary to communicate the results of the customers' actions back to the utility. Thus, this talk is about the means of communicating, deciding about(computing), and acting on (control) information. Its purpose is to describe the outlines of a system that could perform these functions in the future, to discuss ways of getting from here to there, and to point out that, in the process of getting from here to there, we may well find opportunities for the provision of new utility services that go well beyond those being considered at this meeting.