Demand Response Demands Response

It’s been a hot, hot summer: Temperatures are consistently hitting 90 here in western Maryland, occasionally topping triple digits. But my power has suffered only a couple of flickers, what we call "Allegheny Energy moments." The air conditioning has kept things comfortable. Thanks, King Coal.

But down the road in Baltimore, things have been a bit different, and there’s a lesson here.

Peak Heat

At the peak of the heat, the PJM Interconnection called on the region’s power producers to conserve to protect the grid from collapse. Baltimore’s BGE (everyone still thinks of it and calls it "Baltimore Gas and Electric") responded by triggering its "PeakRewards" demand response program. Some 350,000 customers have signed up for the program that allows the utility to cycle air conditioning, in return for bill credits.

Clearly, a lot of BGE’s customers who signed up for the program either forgot about it, which is entirely likely, or didn’t really understand it, which is also entirely plausible. And BGE most likely didn’t fully explain the possible consequences of the program when customers signed up and hasn’t kept customers fully informed as the heat wave settled in. Customers failed to understand and the utility failed to anticipate and explain.

The Baltimore Sun reported: "Customers complained en masse Friday—on social networking sites, over the phone and by email—about the company’s energy-saving program. Many people thought that the program was misrepresented in promotional materials. ‘I felt they really took advantage of customers who signed up for this plan. Nobody ever had any idea—me for one—that they could really shut down our cooling for an entire day,’ said Lisa Larcher, a 47-year-old mother who lives in Gambrills with her husband, two daughters and two cats. ‘It could have been dangerous.’"

The Sun reported an explanation offered by BGE executive Mark Case: "The communications problems were caused by overburdened call centers and an overloaded cellular network, Case said. The company’s radio signals used to remotely control cooling units were jammed from the high volume of requests earlier in the day to turn units back on, he said, and the company is working to improve call center availability and radio signal transmission."

Can You Hear Me Now?

What we have here is a failure to communicate. The blame goes to BGE, not its customers, and it reflects a company that wasn’t thinking ahead. My suspicion is that BGE is far from unique and many, maybe most, distribution utilities aren’t ready to readily communicate with their customers under stress. The failure was also a failure to communicate "with" customers rather than "to" them.

A letter to the Sun from Elaine Rafferty captured the customer reaction. "Our air conditioning was off at least seven hours," she wrote. "When BGE installed our thermostat we were told that we likely would never even notice the turn-off because our air-conditioner would be off at most only about 15 minutes at a time. That wasn’t the case, however. We would much rather have known what to expect, and I am sure others feel the same way."

BGE’s demand response program is part of its "smart grid" efforts. But not leveling with customers in advance, and not being prepared to cope with communications traffic in a stressful period isn’t smart. It’s the old, familiar thinking that views the people who use electricity as captive "ratepayers" rather than intelligent customers.

Demand response and smart grid programs won’t win willing customers until utilities learn that customer communication is a central element of the programs that must be built in from the beginning.

—Kennedy Maize is MANAGING POWER‘s executive editor.