When you look at the electricity supply chain, who do we trust. The national grid operator (Transpower, in New Zealand) is up there, making it all work is what they do, get the power from source to your region. But they are a long way from the consumer, chances are not many people know who they are or what they do and that's fine, it's a government agency providing a core backbone service.
We have been running Meridian energy's "Daily Energy Report" for their smart meter customers for a couple of months now and the uptake is exceeeding our (or more importantly Meridian's) expectations! We also got a nice feature in the Christchurch Press yesterday http://tinyurl.com/3bm5sz4
Energy News reported yesterday that the New Zealand Electricity Authority has annoyed electricity retailers and distributors by saying "consumers [will be able] to nominate whether the retailer or the distributor appoints the metering equipment provider. They would also give consumers the right to free access to metering data for the purpose of bill verification" [read the full article here]
Cortexo is pretty passionate about interoperability, open source and collaboration. It was good to be part of a discussion with some leading software industry leaders discussing collaboration in the New Zealand software sector. There's only 4 million of us New Zealanders, if we don't work together (to conquer the world!) how will we succeed?
On Tuesday 22nd February 2011 Christchurch was hit by a 6.3 magnitude earthquake which devastated the central business district and many residential suburbs also claiming over 160 lives.
The full quote was “relatively few customers are open to taking on some risk and are sufficiently engaged with their electricity retailer” said Mighty River power in an article for Energy News today. They were commenting on the rejection by most retailers to provide customised compensation schemes, which will run during energy conservation campaigns.
Yesterday (Monday 1st Nov), UK Trade & Investment named Cortexo the regional winner of the UKME competition (UK Entrepreneur) in New Zealand.
The issue around data privacy is a big one for Smart Grid players. Who owns that data? If its my hot water your monitoring, surely I own the data?