Modernizing America's Electricity Infrastructure by Mason Willrich

Author:Mason Willrich [Willrich, Mason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262036795
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2017-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Key Issues

Ownership, Privacy, and Use of Electricity Consumption Data

Ownership, privacy, and use issues have bedeviled PUC proceedings as they consider proposals for smart-grid technologies and applications. In addressing them, it is helpful to divide life at home from life at work. Electric consumers as individuals are likely to assert a right of ownership and privacy about their electricity consumption at home. Consumers may argue their energy consumption at home is analogous to their health or financial data. An individual consumer’s acceptance of health or financial services implies consent to the provider’s use of the consumer’s data related to the service provided. This same reasoning should apply to energy. In the case of a business or other enterprise, electric consumption data may be viewed as proprietary in competitive industrial settings but less valued in a variety of other settings. Nevertheless, in both individual and business cases, electric consumer information in America’s consumption-driven economy will have a market value in addition to the value to the utility that collects it.

Should the regulated-monopoly utility that collects data from its customers be able to share in the value that data creates beyond those uses that make the utility’s operations more efficient, safe, or reliable? California’s PUC has concluded that IOUs may use customer data necessary for utility operations, but they may not profit from data sales to third parties. In an era when electricity rates are likely to increase for the foreseeable future, why not enable IOUs to sell their consumer data, with individual anonymity protected, to third parties? The revenues realized should be returned as refunds to utility customers. If numerous third parties acquire, analyze, store, and market electric-consumer data virtually free of charge from the utility, then it would seem to be an opportunity for big data to earn excessive returns at the expense of utility customers, not to mention shareholders. Therefore, appropriate payments should be made for sanitized or anonymized consumer data.

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