Prove It or Pay Up

Illinois to Smart Grid: Prove You’re Worth it—or Pay - Green Tech Grid

Illinois utilities are about to have to prove their smart grid can do what it promises. For utilities ComEd and Ameren Illinois, that means cutting outages, inactive meters, estimated billing, energy theft and other money-wasters the smart grid was meant to prevent -- or paying penalties out of their profits.

The utilities will have to reduce outages by 20 percent, energy theft by 50 percent and inactive meters (those delivering power to unoccupied homes) by a whopping 90 percent under the new rules. These are the kinds of efficiencies that most smart meter projects out there promise they’ll deliver, but under Illinois’ new law, they’ll now be measured for year-by-year progress against those 10-year goals.

It’s important to remember that the lion’s share of benefits of the smart grid go toward utilities’ bottom lines, by reducing operations costs and deferring capital expenditures. It only seems fair they should be held to some standard in proving they’re helping their customers, as well for the money they're charging them to implement the new technology.